Felt Coffee Cup Sleeves - DIY

 Felt is such a lovely and forgiving medium to work with- you don't need to worry about the edges unraveling, the colors are vibrant, it's easy to cut and easy to embellish with all manner of cool things.

It's the perfect fabric to use for this felt coffee cup sleeves project, and we had a bunch of fun playing around with colors and shapes to sew on to the finished sleeves.

These make awesome holiday gifts, and are easy enough for kids to make, too! You can choose to use any felt- craft felt is available at any craft store, or you can buy the more luscious wool felt from Etsy sellers or online if you do a search for 'wool felt'.

Materials:

• Felt pieces
• Embroidery thread
• Embroidery needle
• Scissors
• Pen
• Cardboard coffee sleeve to trace around

Directions:

First take your cardboard sleeve and open it up so it's flat. Trace around it onto the pieces of felt you want to use as coffee cup sleeves.

Cut out your felt shapes, and cut out whatever shapes you will want to applique onto the sleeves. We've made just embroidered coffee cup sleeves before, but this time we thought it would be fun to add cool felt shapes.

Once you've figured out your color schemes/felt shape layout, you can begin embroidering the shapes onto the sleeves.

I laid out 4 small squares onto each sleeve and sewed each on on with a French Knot. I've shown how to do a French Knot below; take your needle up from back to front of the felt (and shape), wrap the embroidery thread around the needle 3 or 4 times. Push the wrapped thread to the base of the needle with your fingers, and then push the needle back down through the fabric, right next to where it came out.

After your lovely shapes have been applied to your sleeve, it's time to sew that puppy up! You can use a basic whip stitch on the overlapped edges, and it looks really cute.

 Try different felt shapes on your sleeves, extra embroidery stitches, sewn-on beads or sequins. This is a totally open-ended project that you can tailor to your whims!

Jeanette Nyberg lives in the Chicago area with her husband and kids. She's enthralled with pretty much everything creative and dedicates a whole blog to art and design for kids. Visit her at Artchoo and follow her on Pinterest, the greatest place on earth.

 Jeanette is also a Sverve Influencer. Check her out  here.