Felt Tree Ornaments

I saw this cute ornament idea to make felt trees on Pinterest (of course), and decided to try this with the kids. To be honest, this was a lot more time consuming and harder than I thought it was going to be. But the kids had a lot of fun and liked designing their own ornaments, and I think they did a good job, especially for their first sewing project. :0)

We used green felt (I picked out three different shades, so they had a choice for the front of the tree color and the back of of the tree color.), brown felt for the trunk, and yellow felt for the star. We also used beads for the garland on the tree and buttons and sequins for the ornaments.

The threaded their own needles. (I got ones with fairly large eyes though to make it easier for them.)

After we cut out triangles in the color of felt they wanted on top, they started making their garland on the trees. I knotted their thread for them and then they pulled the thread through the felt at the top of the tree. Then they put beads on the thread until they had enough for the section of garland they were doing, then pulled the thread through the felt again and back up to do another section of garland. They all did three sections of garland.

After their garland was done, they sewed buttons and sequins on for ornaments. This was actually harder for them than the garland, but they got the hang of it after I helped out a few times.
When they were satisfied with their ornaments, they chose their back felt color, and sewed around the tree to connect them on 2 1/2 sides.

This was actually really easy for all three of them. I think they had the sewing part down by this time. :0)
After they had 2 1/2 sides down, they stuffed it with cotton balls, then closed it up.

Originally, we were going to cut stars out of the yellow felt, but we all decided we weren't very good at cutting out stars, so I ran to Walmart and got these cute beads. (because I couldn't find star beads or buttons.)

They sewed their "stars" on and I added the string so they could hang them on the tree.

Here is Lily's:

Riley's:

Zach's:

They all did a good job, and even though this took us over 2 hours (seriously...) I think they had fun and I know they are very proud of their trees. :0)