Add some festive colour to your home with these hand-embroidered felt decorations!MATERIALS
Makes one decoration

30cm x 15cm felt
Stranded embroidery cottons in several colours
Small amount of stuffing
Pattern templates (which you can download here)
Pencil
Standard hand-sewing kit

In this DIY, we will use straight stitch, French knots, star stitch and blanket stitch. If you’re not familiar with these, there are lots of YouTube tutorials that can take you through the stitches.

METHOD
1. Print out the template sheet and cut out the outer star shape.

2. Cut two 15cm² pieces of felt and set one aside for later. On the remaining piece of felt, draw around your star template in pencil. You can copy out the stitching guidelines from the template (choosing between the two designs) or transfer them to your felt by tracing them in pencil, turning the tracing over, face-down, on the felt and drawing firmly over the back of the lines.3. Decide which colours you’d like to use for the different parts of the design. The lines represent long stitches and the dots represent French knots. Thread your needle with a length of cotton (we’ll use all six strands of stranded cotton) in your first colour and tie a knot at the end. Bring your needle through from the back where you want to start sewing.

Use long stitches to fill in the lined sections. When you finish a section, secure the thread at the back and change colour for the next section. For the dots, add a French knot (made by looping the cotton around the needle twice before returning the needle back through the same hole).

4. Once your embroidery is complete, lay out your other square of felt and place your embroidered one on top, right-side up, pinning them together. Cut around the outer shape, through both layers.5. We’re now going to sew the two layers together with a blanket stitch. To begin your blanket stitch, bring your needle up roughly 3mm in from the edge, loop it over that edge and bring it through 3mm in from the edge again, 4mm to the right of the first stitch, but before pulling the thread all the way through, pass your needle under the thread that’s looped over the edge. Repeat this process of passing the needle under the thread for each stitch.6. Pause your blanket stitch when you have roughly 3.5cm left to sew and use your stuffing to fill your little shape. Once stuffed, finish sewing the last little bit of blanket stitch.

7. Cut a roughly 15cm length of one of your stranded cottons and tie the ends in a knot to form a loop. With a single strand of thread, sew the loop in place at the top of your decoration.Hang up and enjoy!See more cool stuff from Anna Alicia over here.