Felt bowtie pasta

I have these elaborate plans to make my daughter a lot of felt food for her (soon to be created) play kitchen.  These best intentions have so far not led to much of anything except a small pile of bowtie pasta.  Especially as I had plans to give her the play kitchen for... well... Christmas. 

But it turns out that bowtie pasta is really easy to make and looks very very realistic.

Materials:

Felt in the desired pasta color

Pinking Shears

Scissors

Thread in color to match pasta

needle and thread or sewing machine

Method: 

1. Use the pinking shears to cut your felt into strips the width you want for your pasta 

2. Use the scissors to cut your pasta.

 

3. Fold it in half, and then fold the cut edges up to the middle fold. 

 

4. Use needle and thread or your sewing machine to sew it together at the fold.  I used the setting on my sewing machine that you can use to sew on buttons, basically you can just do a zig zag stitch with a  zero length or with the fabric feeds disengaged.  or you can just hand sew a tack, but I found sewing through four layers of felt more difficult than it was worth.  The tack runs perpendicular to the fold.

5. Cut the threads.  I found for extra security it was helpful to tie the strings together with small knots before snipping the excess thread, just to be 100% sure it would not come undone.

6. Voila!  Bowtie Pasta!

I gave her the pasta and she immediatly decided the best thing to do with it was to roll them in paint and then use them like small sponge paintbrushes.  So, now we have slightly deformed and very colorful play pasta.  Toddlers will be toddlers.  Gave me a good idea for a homemade "paintbrush" though.  Maybe I'll work on that after I finish this play kitchen. :-)