Lots of Sparkly Felt Owl Ornaments!

I've been trawling through my photo archives a lot lately looking for old project photos and a few weeks ago I found a folder of photos from a project I never shared here on my blog!

 
Way back in 2012 I posted a tutorial for making felt owl ornaments, adapted from the plush owl sewing tutorial I'd shared the previous year.

A few years ago I decided to revamp this tutorial, sewing lots of colourful felt owls as samples and taking step by step photos to make the post even more useful.

I stitched a whole batch of sparkly owls and took and edited photos of them...

... but never got round to taking the step photos or writing a new version of the tutorial!

I think I ended up being too busy and deciding that the original tutorial was perfectly good (which it is!) and just selling my finished felt owls and forgetting about them.

Having rediscovered the photos, though, it feels wrong to just let them sit gathering virtual dust so I thought I'd share them with you guys today.

Maybe they'll inspire you to visit my felt owl ornaments tutorial and make some cute and sparkly decorations of your own during the holidays? 

 

If you're celebrating Christmas tomorrow, I hope you'll have a great one xxx

How To: Felt Owl Ornaments

Look! I made some owl ornaments!

This is a slightly lazy how-to as it's not a new tutorial, but instead a suggestion for adapting my felt owl pattern to make some cute ornaments for your Christmas tree. 

Use the templates from this post, but print them at 50% instead of 100% and don't cut out any of the feather shapes. I did think about just making a mini version of my original owl in some festive colours but the feathers are pretty fiddly to cut out at half size and I wanted to add a bit of sparkle instead. 

To give you an idea of how they both work out, size wise, here's one of the owl ornaments...

... and here's the original plush felt owl I stitched last year:

You could use shades of brown felt for your owls as I have or pick your favourite colours or shades that tie in with your festive decorating scheme. 

A) Follow steps 1 & 2 as described in the original tutorial (just leaving out the feather shapes). 

B) Skip steps 3 & 4.

C) Follow steps 5 & 6 as described.

D) Then decorate your owls! 

I added gold sequins to one owl,  laying out the sequins first to work out the best arrangement and then stitching them in place one by one with orange sewing thread. I used two stitches per sequin, which I think helps the sequins look a little like feathers, maybe? I love how sparkly the finished owl is. 

I then embroidered the other owls with rows of single stitches, sewn with gold metallic embroidery thread (floss). I used half the number of strands, and took care not to pull my stitches too tight and distort the shape of the felt. Metallic thread can be quite fiddly to work with so if you're a beginner I'd recommend choosing a nice shade of standard thread instead. 

E) Add a loop of narrow ribbon about 15cms (6 inches) long. You can see how to do this over in my felt Christmas Tree ornaments tutorial. I used some super cute mini ricrac from my stash, but any narrow ribbon that matches your owls will do nicely. 

F) Follow steps 7 & 8 to sew up and stuff your owls... and you're done!

Your finished ornament will look something like this:

I think the owl ornaments would make adorable Christmas gifts - if you know someone who is a big owl fan, you could even sew them a whole parliament of owls for their tree. 

You could also make a garland by hanging the ornaments onto a length of matching ribbon, with colourful felt beads/balls strung in between and maybe add some felt oak leaves too for a woodland theme... or use an owl ornament as a gift topper on a larger Christmas gift decorated with oak leaves and faux bois paper.

This tutorial is for non commercial use only: you can use it for as many ornaments as you like for yourself or as gifts for friends but please don't make any for sale. Please feel free to borrow a couple of photos if you want to blog about this project, but remember to credit me and link back to the original source, and do not reproduce my entire tutorial or any pattern pieces on your site. Thanks!

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