Homemade Felt Vegetable Garden (Part 1)

We were on a strict budget for Christmas this year, so I had to get creative when getting the girls' gifts.  E is always pretending that she has a vegetable garden, so I thought, why not make one?  Though it made for a lot of late nights sewing, it was a lot of fun and definitely worth it!  I didn't think about sharing it until I was almost done, so I don't have as many pictures as I'd like, but I'll share what I have!

There are so many great tutorials out there that I took advantage of while creating her vegetable garden.  I ended up with corn stalks, tomato plants, carrots, beets, potatoes and green onions.  For the sake of time (yours and mine), I'll show a couple of vegetables created at a time.  Here's the finished product:

I found the basket at Michael's Craft Store.  For the dirt I simply cut pool noodles the width of the basket and covered each with brown felt, using hot glue to hold the felt on.  (Sorry I don't have pictures of this step since I actually am reusing the basket that I created for their flower garden.)  Here's a picture I dug up of the finished "dirt" (pun intended).

I started with the carrots since there was a great tutorial and they seemed the easiest to tackle.  Here is the tutorial I used by Craftiness Is Not Optional: Easy Carrot Recipe.  My only addition was to add a wide craft stick/tongue depressor inside the carrot to make it easier to stick into the garden while still maintaining its shape.  Since my steps were so similar to the tutorial I used, I didn't take pictures of my process.

Next were the beets.  This was another one I found a great tutorial for by Cut Out And Keep: Beets!  I loved how they made the leaves look curly, so I imitated that part exactly.  However, my beets are more 2D, since I wanted them to fit in between the pool noodle dirt rows, so I drew a beet shape on a piece of paper and cut out 2 (for each beet) from the dark pink felt.  I also added a smaller piece of a craft stick to the inside, just as I had done with my carrots.  Here are the finished beets:

I'll share the tomato plants in more detail (including pictures) in my next post.  :)