Felt Meeple Ornaments

It's been so cold here this November. This weekend we had a warm snap and we put the Christmas lights up on the house for fear it would be freezing from here on out. We usually wait until after Thanksgiving, but we weren't alone. Several of our neighbors put up lights too. So it's officially beginning to look a lot like Christmas out there. So I knew I wanted to do another holiday craft this week.

  

Since I needed to drag my tiny sewing machine out to fix dear husband's Tae Kwon Do uniform, I figured I'd sew up some felt ornaments that I had cut out and waiting to be sewn. I actually cut these out years ago. I finished one of them to give as a gift and the other two just sat waiting to be completed. These felt cut-outs are in the shape of Meeples, which are popular game tokens for strategy games (especially Carcassonne). I found a meeple outline online and adjusted the size of it in Word, then I printed it out on paper and cut around it. I used the paper meeple as a pattern. I pinned it on top of two layers of felt and cut my shapes out.

With my two meeple shapes pinned together and a ribbon pinned between the layers for hanging, I top stitched around the edges very carefully.

I tried to guide it as best as I could, but when going around the arms and head, I had to stop with the needle in the fabric and lift the presser foot repeatedly to complete a curved edge.

I stitched all around the edge (a little sloppy on one of the arms, but not too bad) and left one of the legs unstitched along two sides so that the ornament could be stuffed with polyfill stuffing. 

Above you can see my stitched meeple with the leg left unstitched.  Below you can see me stuffing the ornament.  I used a stick pen to stuff the stuffing into the arms and the head (a pencil or chopstick would also work well).

When I was done stuffing, I carefully stuffed a little bit into the open leg and shoved it under the presser foot of my machine and top stitched the opening closed.  

When I was finished with the sewing, I trimmed the tiny bit of filling that was sticking out and any uneven felt edges.

My purple meeple ornament turned out about as well as the one I completed a few years ago, good with just a few crooked stitches. The green one was a tricky little ornament though. Apparently the two felt meeples weren't exactly the same shape, and I kept on having to restitch areas because it would be safely on the felt on one side, but not on the other. This is a pretty rare problem with felt--it doesn't move too much when you're sewing because it sticks to itself so well, so as long as your meeples are the same size and shape, you shouldn't run into that problem.

Fortunately, since the thread is pretty close to the same color as the felt, it would be a pretty easy fix to hand stitch some contrasting embroidery thread over the edge in a blanket stitch to jazz it up and hide the stitches, but I think learning how to do that will probably have to wait until next Christmas.