Tutorial: Felt Pizza Slice

This is my first attempt at writing up a tutorial, so please let me know if you have any questions, or if I need to clarify anything here!

For the few months, I’ve been busy making various felt play food for my son.  I’ve gotten so many great ideas from the tutorials posted by Polly of Helping Little Hands in her Felt Food Cook-Along…and have added far too many more things to my ever-growing project list!  Quite a few other bloggers have linked up their own tutorials with her cook-along, and I finally decided to take the plunge and share one of my own. 

My son loves pizza, so I started searching online for tutorials on how to make a felt pizza slice for him. Everything I found was instructions for making whole pizzas, rather than individual slices, so I got brave and tried to figure it out on my own.

I used a mix of eco-felt bought by the yard, and sheets of cheap craft felt.  Many people who make felt food claim that the best materials for making play food is 100% pure wool felt, which is wonderful in theory…but doesn’t agree with my wallet.  Use wool felt if you can, but don’t beat yourself up over it if the less-expensive stuff is all your budget allows.

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Step One: Cut out your felt shapes

You’ll need a light tan felt for the crust, an ivory shade for the cheese, red shades for sauce.  We almost always have pepperoni and mushrooms on our pizza (I swear, I fell more in love with my husband when we discovered that we love the same bizarre topping combination on our pizzas!)  so I used a deeper red for pepperoni, and more of the tan for mushrooms. 

I don’t have printable patterns.  In fact, I just kind of winged it when cutting everything out.  Start with the crust, stacking two pieces of tan felt on top of each other, and roughly cutt out a triangular shape.  Curve the top edge of the pieces to get the right look. 

Now you’re going to cut out two triangular pieces for the sauce and the cheese. Cut the sauce out first, using the size of the crust as a guide. You want the sauce to be just slightly smaller than the crust, and the edges shouldn’t be perfectly straight. Cut a similar (but not identical!) piece from the ivory felt for the cheese, just a hair smaller than the sauce so that the sauce peeks out from behind it once they’re stacked together.  Remember, you’re not aiming for perfection here.

If you want toppings, cut them out now. I used the end of a spool of thread as a guide when cutting out circles for the pepperoni, and cut the mushrooms free-hand. If you like toppings such as peppers, Helping Little Hands has a tutorial for those here.

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Step Two: Sewing Your Pieces Together

I hand-sew all my felt food.  I’m sure this is something that could easily be done on a sewing machine, but I’m still a rookie with that machine and it tends to run away from me.  Plus, I’ve been making my son’s food at night, after he’s in bed.  My machine’s loud enough that in our apartment, you can hear it running from his bedroom even with his white noise machine cranking. so I’d rather not risk waking him up!  And I have to admitt…it’s strangely therapeutic, sewing up these things by hand.

So, if you’d rather use a machine to stitch these, more power to you! 

Sew the toppings to your cheese piece first.

Next, sew the cheese to the sauce (oops, no picture of this step.  But it’s pretty self-explanatory, really).

Finally, sew the entire stack onto one of the tan crust pieces.

Now, if you want a more 3-dimensional crust, free-hand cut a strip from the tan felt that follows the curve on the top of the crust pieces, about an inch wide.  Cut two or three more curved strips, slightly narrower than the first. (Ack!  No photo of this step, either.  I’ll try to get some photos tonight and add those in ASAP.  If you scroll down to step three, you’ll see a picture of the felt strips sandwiched between the crust).

Lay the widest piece on top of the crust, and sew just the bottom edge to the crust.  Sandwich the two or three thinner pieces in between, to give the crust some dimension.  

(Disclaimer: I tried this first using poly-fil instead of the narrower strips of felt for stuffing…and didn’t care for how lumpy-bumpy it came out.  If you’d rather, you could stuff this section using poly-fil).

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Step Three: Sew on Backside of Crust

 Lay the second crust piece on the back of the piece you’ve been working on. 

Now, you could stuff your pizza with cotton batting if you like thick-crust pizza.  I don’t, so…at first I didn’t stuff it with anything.  And wound up with a pizza slice that drooped when you held it by just the edge of the crust.  That made me think of soggy pizza…the kind where the entire sheet of cheese slides off and hits you in the chin when you bite into it, and that’s just not a good thing. 

So I went back to the drawing board, and decided to use a thick piece of cardboard as a filling.  I cut out a a piece a bit smaller than the crust, and sandwiched that between the top and bottom crusts.

 

Now blanket-stitch around the entire thing with embroidery floss, securing the scraps of felt inside the crust.

And there you go…yummy, crispy, thin-crust pizza, just the way we like it! 

 Since this was my first attempt at writing up a tutorial, please let me know if anything doesn’t make sense.  How did I do…is this relatively easy to follow?