Homemade Felt Vegetable Garden (Part 2)

Here's how I made my tomato plants (my daughter's favorite).

 You need:

• Green felt
• green embroidery thread (and needle)
• 1/2 inch thick dowel cut down to about 6 inches
• sew-on velcro
• 3 green pipe cleaners

I didn't have a pattern to follow for the leaves, so I just sort of free-formed them. I created 3 three-leaf pieces and 3 two-leaf pieces.

I had already sewn my green tube together, so sorry I didn't get a picture of it before! I cut out a piece of felt that was 8 inches by two inches, folded it in half the "hot dog way" and sewed a quick stitch up the side and across ONE end (leaving a small opening at the other end). I then turned it right-side-out so that the seam was now on the inside.

To create the shape of the tomato plant, I took the three green pipe cleaners, folded each in half, and twisted them together into the shape shown in the picture above. Don't worry about the bottom "stem" part of the pipe cleaners, that will be hidden inside of the green felt stem when you're done. If you want more branches, simply add more pipe cleaners.

Next, I cut the velcro to fit on the underside in the middle of each of the three-leaf pieces. I placed one of the pipe cleaner branches in between the three-leaf piece and the velcro, and sewed around the velcro to secure it in place. I repeated this at the end of each of the other two branches.

I then cut a small square of green felt to fit the center of the two-leaf pieces.

Placing the leaf-piece below and the small square above the pipe cleaner branch, I sewed around the square to secure the leaves in place on all three branches as well.

Here are the branches before the stem is added.

Next, I took the dowel and slid it into the green felt stem sleeve.

Once that was inside, I slid the "stem" piece of the branches down into the stem sleeve alongside the dowel.

To secure it into place I cut a small circle of green felt, placed it on top of the center of the branches and hand-stitched it to the opening of the stem sleeve. I don't have pictures of my steps for making the tomatoes because it is shown beautifully in this blog post by Et Moi Alors. It's in French, but the pictures say it all! The only change I made was to add a piece of velcro to the top of the tomato so that they could hang from the branches.

And voila! You have a beautiful tomato plant ready to be planted and harvested. :)