Christmas presents - part 1 : Tea Set

Good morning everybody! Today I am presenting you the tea-set I made for my God-daughter for Christmas. In Summer I had made her some felt pasta, biscuits etc., but her mother told me that she actually had neither tea cups nor tea pot! So I thought that it was the perfect idea. Plus since I am not going back to France this year for Christmas time because of the imminent arrival of our second child, making the set out of felt proved to be the ideal idea: it is very light!

I first started searching for patterns, but did not really find much which was simple enough for my taste - it had to be so easy that I could do it in just a few hours (which I did in the end but spread over several days).

I came accross this tea-set which is for sale. I never thought of buying it since I knew I could make it myself and for much cheaper, but it more or less inspired me (I am pretty sure I can safely say that I did not copy it).

I chose the size I wanted (height, width, length) and thought it would be sooooo simple to draw a pattern from there! But in the end I had to call to rescue two physicists! J. from Switzerland and my husband (a huge thank you to them!), they did all sorts of calculations for me and came up with the pattern shown bellow (the brown circles are mine and served a a base for their calculations):

Once the pieces cut, I put some rick-rack band along them so as to decorate the plain (although not too sad looking) felt - oh by the way, I chose thick felt so that the cups and tea pot would stand properly on their own.

Who says tea cups, also says tea bags! I made seven with thin kitchen curtain fabric (no idea how this sort of fabrics is called) and  filled them with remains of fleece and felt cut in mini-pieces. I obviously attached a string with a label on top to the bags. Miniature job really but wait to see the final picture, it was all worth it!

Sewing everything together was not necessarily a very easy job, but my favourite part was the bottom circle. Somehow it was fun to sew it, at the end one could not even see that it was two different pieces of felt fixed together!

 

 

 

Aaaaand, tadaaaaam! Here is the whole thing together, little H. can play happily and serve tea to her dolls and her parents!

 A few more Christmas-presents posts are coming soon! Since I do not know how much time I will have in the next weeks, I am writing them ahead and programming their publication. This way I hope to avoid a long blank period of time :)

[Scheduled Post]