Felt Food for Chinese New Year

JediBoy and I made some deliciously easy felt food to continue our celebration of Chinese New Year.  Using just two sheets of tan felt and a glue gun, we made 12 dumplings and 6 fortune cookies!

The photo-heavy directions for this project are behind the cut.

We assembled our tools: tan felt, scissors, a Sharpie marker, two lids – we used a small applesauce lid and a medium raisin can lid, and a dual-temp glue gun with fabric glue.  You could use any size circles to trace, and any kind of glue gun.

We used the Sharpie to trace the lids onto the felt.  I fit 12 applesauce lids easily on one sheet of felt and squeezed six raisin can lids onto the other sheet.

JediBoy cut out the 12 smaller circles to make the dumplings, while I cut out the 6 larger circles to make the fortune cookies.  I did the cutting of the bigger shapes because the circles were so close they touched on the sides & there was no room for error.

We sat on the kitchen floor and assembled our pieces.  Each dumpling circle got a few scraps of felt on the middle to be the filling.  We cut long skinny rectangles from plain paper to be our fortune papers for the fortune cookies.

JediBoy was excited to use the glue gun!  The other day I thought it was too hard for him to do, but we just hadn’t waited long enough to let the glue warm up.  He did fine with mine on the low-temp setting.

JediBoy carefully spread glue along the edge of half of the circle and we folded it shut, smushing the filling inside.

We gave the glue a few seconds to cool down a bit, and then fluted the edges of the dumplings with our fingers to give them a little more authentic look.  JediBoy held the dumplings, fluting pinched in place, for 20 seconds or so to give the glue time to set in that position.

For the fortune cookies, we also spread glue along the edge of half the circle.  We laid our fortune strip right across the middle and folded the circle in half, pressing shut.

JediBoy pinched the cookie in half along the fold, pressing corner to corner to make the traditional fortune cookie shape.  I dabbed a bit of glue at the spot where the two halves touched, and we held it shut until it dried.

The final product:

JediBoy set out a meal, complete with red plate, placemat and chopsticks.  Picking these up with chopsticks is actually very similar to the real deal and so it’s good practice!

JediBoy tried a dumpling and pronounced it delish.

He even let BabyGirl have some!  She was a little mad that we wouldn’t let her pull apart the fortune cookies to get at the paper inside, and JediBoy started imagining a fortune cookie made in halves with Velcro pieces so we could take them apart… I told him that was an ambitious project for another day!

This was a fun and very easy project, and the kids are thrilled to have more pretend food for their kitchen.