Felt Food

I've set myself a challenge, a 'felt food' challenge.  I didn't think it would happen quite this way, but this particular project has me hooked!

The project wasn't even on the official written 'projects to-do' list I wrote up the other day, but it has been brewing in my mind for a while and since I started the other night I have been a little obsessed!  (Sorry mum, your chair re-covering is on the back burner I'm afraid, this is much more enjoyable!)

Felt Food.

Little Imp loves playing 'kitchen'.  Making sandwiches, cups of coffee and lemon tea, stirring and cooking.  She also loves helping daddy in his vege garden.  She refuses to eat many a vegetable, but she can annoyingly name many of them while they are still in the ground!  I've seen plastic food sets in the shops & I know she would love to add this sort of thing to her pretend play games, but they are all pretty sad looking...and plastic-y.

So, my first plan is to make Little Imp a box of felt food for Christmas.  My second plan is to challenge myself and not look up any patterns for how to make things.  Of course I have seen images of felt food & looked at the ikea sets of fruits & veg in the past.  But no Google-ing allowed.  Time to work the brain. For one who is highly perceptually challenged this may well prove difficult & end in a great deal of cursing,
unpicking and/or what I will call 'newly discovered' species of strange looking fruit.  But so far, so good.

I've made an apple (that does look a bit blue in this picture, but is really green, promise), some carrots & a few strawberries & have a cucumber and lemon in progress.  Little Imp came across one of the carrots I had not hidden too well the other morning & loved it, so figure that is a good sign to keep going!

General Tips I've worked out so far:

• Where possible I'm using a sewing machine to stitch, either free motion or straight stitching (much speedier & still giving me the finish I'm after).
• My straight stitch machine seams are sewn with about a 1/8 – 1/16^th inch allowance. 
• If making multiple pieces of the same type of ‘food’ try to do them in batches to save time with frequent thread / bobbin changes etc.
• I’m reminding myself that real fruit & veg are not ‘perfect’, so seams do not have to be straight & stitches can be wonky and that is fine!

More details for each fruit/veg to follow.