Felt Flower Birdhouses

Hi friends!  It’s Amy from Ameroonie Designs here again to share this fun tutorial for making these cute embellished birdhouses.

You will need:

Birdhouses

paper

paint

sandpaper

brushes

felt

hot glue gun and glue sticks

wood glue

Assembly:

• Begin by lightly sanding all the wood pieces.


• Decide which papers will be on each birdhouse and paint with coordinating paint.  If you want to use the birds, paint them now.


• Paint all the bases and candlesticks white.


• Trace the birdhouses on the paper and cut out and glue to the birdhouses.  You can find a great tutorial for these steps here.


• Lightly distress the painted pieces with sandpaper. (optional)


• Glue the birdhouses to the bases using hot glue, then attach the birdhouse base to the candlestick.


• Embellish with felt flowers. (see tutorial below)

Felt flower How-to:

A couple of things to remember before making your felt flowers: flowers in nature are all different and none of them are perfect- so don’t get too worried about your flowers being exactly the same or exactly perfect.  That being said- working with felt can take some practice.  Don’t be afraid to make a few “tester” flowers first, to make sure you have the hang of it.  Also, you  might want to make them a little bigger than what you will want on your birdhouses when you are doing the test run, it will make assembling the flowers easier.  I used acrylic felt on these flowers, it’s readily available and inexpensive.  Feel free to use any kind of felt you like though.

I’m going to show you how to make the felt “roses” today.  You can find tutorials for the other flowers on the birdhouses on my blog, but if you just make the roses in different colors and sizes, you won’t really need other flowers, unless you want to.

1. Begin with a strip of felt about 1/2″ wide.  The length will depend on how full you want your flower to be- the longer the strip, the bigger the flower.

2. Cut scalloped shapes out of the strip of felt.

3. Take a 1/2″ square of felt and put a dab of hot glue in the center. (the black dot shown in the picture) and pull all the sides around the dot of glue to create a cone shaped center with a rounded top.

4. Run a line of hot glue along the bottom, straight side of one petal (the black line in the picture) and wrap the petal around the center you created in the last step.  Repeat with a second petal, on the opposite side of the center.  Continue adding petals staggering their placement so they are offset from the other petals.  Keep adding petals until you run out, or the flower is the size you would like.

Once you are done making all your flowers, create some leaves by cutting leaf shapes out of green felt.  I used two different colors to add some texture.  I tried to mimic the shape of the leaves in the floral paper I used, but you can do any shape you like.

Layer the flowers and leaves at the bases of the birdhouses and attach with more hot glue.

Now you have some beautiful embellished birdhouses you can leave out all spring long.

I hope you’ll come look around my blog and check out the other fun projects going on over there.  And if you’d like a $25 gift card to use toward this or another project from The Wood Connection- hop over to my blog and enter to win!

Thanks so much for having me today!

xoxo,

Amy

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