Donuts | Felt Food Tutorial & Printable Sewing Pattern

Hi there! Today I’m starting a new series all about felt food! Felt food is super easy and inexpensive to make. It’s also a great gift for little kids who love playing pretend, and is prettier to have around the house than typical plastic play food. Plus, every felt food post is going to have a printable pattern to make your project even easier. For our first project, I’m a felt food tutorial on how to make donuts! Here’s what you’ll need.

Donuts | Felt Food Tutorial + Pattern

Supplies:

• Felt. I used brown, pink, and teal.
• Embroidery thread in coordinating colors, plus white for sprinkles.
• Fiber fill. You only need a small amount, so a little goes a long way.
• Embroidery needles. These have a large eye so they’re easy to thread.
• Pins.
• Scissors.
• Donut template. You can find this at the bottom of this post!

Start by cutting out your template. It includes a template for both the donut and the frosting. Take your round donut template and place it on top of your brown felt, and pin it in place. Then just cut it out!

Make sure to cut out the inside as well. You’ll need two “donut” pieces for each donut. You can either re pin the template, or use the donut you just cut out as a template for the next one.

Now do the same thing to cut out your frosting, but you’ll only need one piece of frosting per donut. Set your two donut pieces aside while we work on decorating the frosting. Some people choose to use beads for the sprinkles, but I prefer to use thread for everything to make it safer for toddlers who are still putting things in their mouths. Pick out two or three colors of embroidery thread for “sprinkles” first. I ended up just using blue and white. Cut about 18 inches of thread, thread it onto your needle, and tie a knot in the end.

Bring your needle up through the back of your frosting, and stitch a small sprinkle like shown. To make your next sprinkle, just bring your needle back up through wherever you’d like the next sprinkle to be.

This is how the back will look. This is much faster and easier than tying off and starting a new thread for every sprinkle. Go ahead and make all the sprinkles you want from that one color. When you’re done, just tie it off with a knot in the back. Go ahead and do the same thing for every color of sprinkles you want.

When you’re happy with your sprinkles, set your frosting down on top of one of your donut pieces like shown. If you’d like, you can pin it in place. Thread a needle with the thread that matches your frosting, and tie a knot in the end. Bring the needle up through the back of the donut piece and the frosting, and then you’re just going to stitch the two pieces together, going back down at the edge of the frosting and coming up just inside the edge of the frosting.

Sew all the way around the edge of the frosting, securing it to the donut. Now you’re going to take our other donut piece and set it underneath the piece with the frosting. Taking another piece of frosting matched thread, insert the needle between the two donut layers, and start stitching all three layers together on the inside donut circle.

When it’s stitched all the way around, bring the needle back through the two donut layers and tie it off with a knot. Right now you’ll have a donut that’s stitched in the middle, and open all the way around the outside. Let’s fix that! Thread your needle with the thread that matches (or comes close to matching) your donut color. Come up through one layer to hide the knot on the inside.

Then start stitching around the outside of your donut. Keep your stitches close together and evenly spaced so they look pretty. Stitch all the way around until you have about an inch of unstitched space. Now let’s make this cute donut come to life. Take little bits of fiber fill and start stuffing your donut, making sure to stuff it evenly all the way around.

When it’s completely stuffed, finished stitching your donut the rest of the way closed. Make a knot on the outside, then insert your needle back into the donut.

Bring it out somewhere in the middle of donut, popping the knot into the inside of the donut. Pull the thread tight and snip it off, and your thread end will be hidden inside the stuffing of the donut. This is one of my favorite tricks to give projects that professional finish.

And you’re all done!

Now make as many donuts as you’d like. You can even make them without sprinkles if you’d like, like this cute blue one!

I hope you had fun making these felt food donuts, and I can’t wait to share more of these projects with you! Just click on the template below to be taken to the page where you can print it out!