How to Make Felt Ornaments with Kids

I made these sweet ornaments with my three-year old and five-year old. Our original plan was to hot glue them together, but when our hot glue gun went missing we took the opportunity to turn this into a sewing party.

My preschooler surprised me and rose to the sewing challenge (I’ll share a photo of that in a moment), while my kindergartener was able to thread her own needle and learned how to tie off knots.

I did the bulk of the work on these, so I’d call this project a collaboration…just something to keep in mind in case you expect your little one to take the lead on this one! Children six and older should be able to do most of the steps themselves.

If you’re not up for sewing, take this as inspiration, and simply hot glue the whole thing together!

Gather Your Supplies

• Felt
• Thread
• Hand-sewing needle. Tip: Use tapestry needles for small hands. These have bigger eyes that are easier to thread, and they’re a bit thicker.
• Treasures to sew on: sequins, beads, jingle bells, and buttons
• A couple straight pins to hold the felt together
• Scissors that will cut fabric. Tip: I have a pair of scissors that are ONLY for fabric, since paper quickly dulls scissors.
• Ornament hooks

Cut and Sew the Felt Ornament

To cut the ornaments, I used our cookie cutters as templates. We used a candy cane, angel, and a tree. I cut the first one out, and then layered it on top of the next color of felt. Then I cut the subsequent layers, each slightly larger than the rest.

To sew the ornaments: 

1. Poke a straight pin through the felt stack.
2. Thread the needle with a long piece of thread. Make it double-long and knot the end.
3. Sew a running stitch through the felt.
4. Knot the thread in the back.

Decorate the Felt Ornament

To embellish your ornament, sew the treasures to the felt. We used sequins and jingle bells (not shown here), and you could also use buttons or beads. My 5-year old wants to add that you could also make designs on the felt with stitches.

Hang your Felt Ornament

Twist the ornament hook into the felt.

Tip: For the tree ornament (below), I twisted it through two layers of felt and it took about ten seconds to poke through. To poke through four layers of felt on the candy cane, it took me about thirty seconds of twisting. 

Once the hook pokes through the felt, twist it off!

Your ornament is ready to hang or to gift to someone special.

p.s. This post took twice as long to write because my 5-year old decided she wanted to be a blogger today. 🙂