How to Make a Felt Animal Mask

Welcome to Craft School and another kids craft project. Today we're going to make these woodland themed masks that are made out of felt and this is a perfect project for the kid who knows how to use adult scissors and wants to learn how to hand sew. The first thing you'll need for this project are the patterns and we've created the three patterns in two parts. You have your main mask page and then all of the details and you have two of those for each animal so go ahead and print those out. You'll also need your felt and we really recommend that you use a wool blend felt because if you use this fusing you'll need to iron it and the other will melt. So pick those out and whatever color palette that you want get creative here. You'll also want some good scissors, some tacky glue, a pencil, fix some embroidery threads to match all your different felts that you want to stitch on. Now for the fox I'm only going to stitch on the cream felt so I picked a cream embroidery thread. I have an elastic here and it's a little bit of a round elastic and this will be really comfortable to hold it on your head. An embroidery needle and some small scissors for your thread and also just to clip little ends and bits that you want to get out of the way. Start by cutting out all of your mask pieces and this will be on the two sheets and the nice thing is we have a little diagram right here to show you which colors each piece will be cut out of and this will guide you when you're ready to cut your felt. So you can pin your pattern onto the felt or what I like to do better is use a pencil and just trace around my pattern. You can do this very lightly and this will give it an easier texture to cut because you can pick it up and not worry about the pattern sliding. For the largest piece of mask you're going to need to cut two out of the felt and one of the tricks that I like to do for the second piece because you will need the fusible bonding to glue them together. I'll just stack one right on top of the fusible bonding and cut them off together. It's sticky enough that it will hold it into place. To cut off of the eyes you'll want to fold your felt in half and make a snip right inside of your circle so that you don't go over the edge and then carefully slide your scissors in, cut all the way to the edge and then around your pencil mark. I've cut the back of my mask and the fusible bonding. I'll take this apart and use my scissors to trim off just a quarter of an inch of the bonding all the way around because when you iron this together you don't want any of this to stick out the edge because it will get sticky on your iron and it'll just kind of make a mess so this is the best way to take care of that. You just want to make this bonding a little bit smaller than your actual felt. So I've cut out all my pieces and I can use this little drawing to line up exactly how to assemble my mask. I'll place them in place. Some of these we're going to glue and some we'll sew and we'll talk about how that is done next. So I'm planning to just stitch the white into place and then the black will be glued. Now notice this white is actually on top of the black so I'll need to glue the black first however there's something to think about when you're using this glue and the needle will not go through the glue. So when you glue the ears on you'll just want to touch the edge of it to hold it in place because we'll do a stitch over the top. I'm just putting a little tiny bead of glue just on the top edge of my ears. Not too much, you don't want it to run out on the sides. You might want to leave a few minutes for this to dry before you stitch and then the white of the ears will go over the top and this is where we're going to sew. Now to keep this in place another trick is to put a little dab of glue on the inside again where you're not going to stitch and let that dry for just a few minutes. I'll do the same with the pieces right down here. Just a little bit in the middle, not on the edges where I'm stitching. I've threaded my needle and I've tied a knot on the ends and now I'll start stitching around the cream felt. You can see the stitches here, they're nice and big and long just to add that texture and they're about a quarter of an inch from the edge. So this is a really great time for you to practice stitching. I'll start from behind and pull my thread through at the corner and then decide exactly how long I want my stitches and how far apart and just do that consistently all the way around. I'm tying off my embroidery thread. And then the last piece is the nose and that one we're just going to glue on with a tacky glue. For this piece I want glue over the whole thing so it stays in place. An easy way to measure the elastic is take the back piece and hold it to your face. And you can kind of mark where it goes on your temples. And then take a piece of elastic and measure it from that spot where you had marked with your fingertips and cut the elastic. And that should fit really well. So to keep everything in place I'm going to stitch my elastic to the back piece of my mask. When you'll stitch you'll want to go through both the felt and the inside of the elastic not just around the elastic. That way it will hold it into place much better. You only need a few stitches, maybe like 3 to 5 that should do it. And to tie that off I'll make sure and put my knot on the side with the edge of the elastic that way it can hide in between the two layers. Tie a knot and clip it and then do your other side. The last step is to put the front of the mask onto the back of the mask and we're going to use this fusible bonding in between so that everything lays really flat and you don't have any bumps from the glue. And this is something you might want to have your grown-up help you do because we're going to use a hot iron. I'm going to simply set that into place and place the front of the mask on top of it. Line that up as best as possible. We're going to go back and clip a little of the ends later so it doesn't quite line up. And this is ready to iron. And we're going to iron this on a medium-high temperature. You can put a cotton cloth over the top if you want to and you want to heat that up really well so that everything fuses together. Take your little tiny scissors and clean up the edges where they might stick out a little bit behind the other colors. And then you can take these scissors and get in here with your eyes and just clean those up a bit too. So here's the finished mask and this is what the back looks like which is really clean and finished. So this is a perfect project for Halloween or for any sort of costume party. You can make one for yourself and two for your friends. Make sure you share your projects with us on your social media using hashtag LeahGriffith and we'll see you for the next Kids Craft video.