Pattern Making Made Easy

Making Patterns On A Smaller Scale...

Pattern making is pretty simple once you get the hang of it. Once you do, you can make anything from stuffed animals to clothing. Since summertime has arrived with a vengeance, I chose to create a stuffed feltie watermelon and ice cream. Got to stay cool somehow in this heat!

When I start a small pattern like this, I begin by drawing in my sketch book with a pencil. This helps me to work out all the kinks before I start cutting everything out. You don't want to make a mistake and have to go back to the drawing board. Since I am hand-sewing these little guys, I didn't add seam allowances to my drawing. Hand-sewing doesn't take much away from the size of these little felties, so that's one thing less to think about.

Once the drawing is complete, I like to sort out the color situation. I've colored each part with colored pencil, so that I know what piece is going to be what color. 

I find that white tissue paper is best to use when making patterns. It's see through, and it also mimics pattern paper that you find when you actually buy a pattern from the store. The tissue paper is placed over the drawing and the image is traced with a pencil. Marker does not work well here because you risk tearing the tissue paper with the ink. Each piece is traced exactly as is onto the tissue paper leaving some space in-between each part. The popsicle stick is drawn slightly longer than the drawing because this leaves some allowance for the seam.

Now it's time to cut out all the parts. I used regular shears to cut out the tissue paper. You don't want to mess up your fabric shears by cutting paper because this will dull the shears. That is why separate shears is needed when cutting out your patterns. After all the pattern pieces are cut out, pencil is used to label each piece, so that I know how many pieces to make for each part.

Once all the pattern pieces are cut out, place each piece onto the felt. There are two ways you can get your image onto the felt. You can either trace each pattern piece with a fabric marker or pin each piece down with pins. Choose whatever works best for you. Then cut everything out with fabric shears, so that you get a nice clean cut.

Pattern Placed onto Felt.

Pattern Pinned to Felt Ready to Cut.

Use Fabric Marker to Trace Pattern

I want these felties to be three dimensional, so I need to make some side pieces. They are going to be various lengths of rectangles, so I decided not to make a pattern. I just wanted to measure and cut. I measured with my measuring tape all the way around each drawing. I decided the width of the sides should be cut at one and a half inches wide. Once all that was figured out, I cut out each side.

The last thing to be done are the tiny details. I hand cut out all of the seeds for the watermelon. Black circles were cut for the eyes. To get the whites of the eyes and the rosy cheeks, I used a hole punch to cut out each piece. This gives me a tiny perfect circle.

Sandwich bags make great containers for all of these pieces, so they won't get lost. It also helps me to keep things together while I am sewing certain parts. All of my pieces are ready to go! Its Sewing Time!