Dragonfly Gems: It has been a while and a tutorial!

Well it has been a while since I have posted anything, I'm always way to busy and when I have free time I like to read other people's blogs, some of my favs are Ucreate, The Sewing Dork, and The Long Thread. They all have some really great tutorials!

Check out the May 23rd giveaway that Sew, Mama, Sew is hosting http://sewmamasew.com/blog2/2011/05/may-giveaway-day-3/

Speaking of tutorials, I was a nut and decided that my kiddo needed to give every little kid in the Kindergarten class a going away present for the summer. There are 16 kiddos in the class. We tried to keep to a summer theme, you know, little buckets with shovels, bubbles, sidewalk chalk, etc, but we also decided that it would be fun to make something personal for each kid, pencil toppers! What was I thinking? pencil toppers? Well it started out as just one pencil with topper for each kid and then it became 2 pencils with toppers for each kid, my kiddo would have loved to do 20 for each kid, but we agreed 2 would be enough. So here it goes the tutorial, let me know if you need more directions, not sure if I took enough pics or not, my little one wanted more and more pics, such a camera ham I have, oh and the little fingers, are my little helper-

Pencil Toppers 1 by 1 ;)

What you will needed:

1 Little Helper
Felt in various colors (Got mine at JoAnn's)
Pkg of Heat n Bond ultra bond no sew adhesive
Freezer paper
Fabric Glue (I used Liquid Fusion)
Decorations (Glitter, buttons, etc)
Pieces of paper 1/2" strips about 2 to 3" long
Scissors with a sharp point
Pencils
Iron and board

NOTE OF CAUTION: When you iron, the paper and the felt get hot fast, make sure to let cool completely before you or the little one touch, we don't want anyone getting burned.

First I searched the web for some clip art designs, or pictures I could use to create my designs (I can not draw to save my life so this seemed like the best way). We decided on some of the basics, hearts, starts, trains, footballs etc. then I copied them to a word doc and adjusted the size to what I thought would be good for a pencil topper and printed them out. Next I used a black sharpie and just went around the edges of the designs so that I would be able to see them better through the freezer paper and heat-n-bond paper. Then I traced with a pencil the designs onto both the freezer paper and the heat n bond paper.

Some of my designs had inside designs as well, like the football had the white strips and the black lacing strip (Oh, didn't realize till after that the lacing is actually white on a football, oops!), I copied them onto just the heat n bond paper. The purpose of the freezer paper is just to cut out a backing for the topper, so everything else is traced onto the heat n bond paper. Now cut out your designs, I left a little gap around the pencil marks as a buffer for cutting. Choose your felt color and iron both the freezer paper and the heat n bond on, I found that it was a good idea to iron a piece of freezer paper over my ironing board first, helps prevent accidently ironing the heat n bond to your board, voice of experience here, I will have to sew me a new board cover. WAIT- One VERY, VERY important step, make sure that when you are placing the heat n bond down that you decide where you want your pencil to stick in and slip that little piece of 1/2" paper under the heat n bond about 2/3rds of the way in, in other words between the heat n bond and the flet, this creates your pocket for the pencil. I found that it was better to make pockets on the sides of some of my designs instead of at the bottom where there might be a point or it would just be difficult to get the pencil in. My iron was set to wool and it only takes about 2-3 seconds of holding it down firm, I did have some issues with the felt staying on the iron when I picked it up, just used the point of my scissors to knock it off. (I did not have any issues with the felt melting, but you might want to test it first since I know not all felt is the same, mine was EcoFi).

Notice you can see the little piece of paper sticking out for the pencil pocket.

After ironing them all on, I began cutting them out. Because I did so many at a time I noticed that the freezer paper started peeling on some of them, just had to reheat them and they were fine.

Now cut out the heat n bond ones, no need to be careful on the paper tab that is sticking out, just cut right over it.
Peel the paper off and you will have just the glue and the paper strip left, next carefully peel the little piece of paper off, it worked best when we started at the edge and gently lifted and peeled back and then just peeled sidewise at the end.

Not sure if you can see it our not but my little helper is showing you that you will be left with a bare spot on the felt that does not have glue. Now lay one glue covered felt over one none glue felt, line up good and iron again.

Let cool and you are ready to decorate! We did glitter on this butterfly. Oh, one good thing with the felt, it was easy to use the glue and make designs and then pour liberal amounts of glitter over it and guess what, you got it! the glitter just fell right off, only stuck to the glue which is what we wanted.