Bumblebee Softie Tutorial. Sew at home project with instructions.

Bumblebee Softie Tutorial

At the beginning of the summer, we made this bumblebee softie.  A while back my friend Trixi asked me to take part in an international sewing day to get children around the world sewing via tutorials and hands-on workshops.  Abbi and I made these cute bacon and egg softies as part of the project.  It was great fun sewing together, and Abbi defintely caught the sewing bug.  Since then we have done a few projects, with more in the pipeline, which I will share when I get a chance to pull together the photos, and write up.

Materials needed:

• Yellow Felt (2 x 20 cm square)
• Black Felt  (10cm square)
• Puffy Paint
• Needle and thread (ideally in the same colours as the felt)
• Stuffing  (I used the volume of around 2 tennis balls to stuff these)

The starting point of the bumblebee softie was a little doodle sketch made by Abbi.  No prizes for the artwork- but gives you the gist of how simple the drawing can be.  In fact the simpler the better.

Using this as the basis, and cut out approximate shapes to represent this.  We dropped the legs, as we though they would be too fussy – (but you could sew on pipe cleaners with little felt feet if this becomes an essential part of your design). First start sewing the stripes of the bumblebee onto the body.  Do both sides, (making sure your stripes line up when you put the sides back together).Sew the stinger on next, so that you can stuff it before the body is fully sewn.Next sew the wings.  Push them between the two body layers and do simple running stitch over the four layers.  The felt is very easy to work with, so even this number of layers isn’t too much of an issue for small hands.
Continue sewing all the way round the bumblebee softie, leaving a gap sufficient to stuff.
Then stuff the little guy with wadding, sewing up the gap when he’s nice and plump.
Add eyes and a mouth using puffy paint.

And here is the finished project.  Really easy for kids to make their own critter.