Felt Sakura

This months crafting project are cherry blossoms - sakura in Japanese. It is a special project for global volunteer month in April. The goal is to have as many volunteers as possible participate to create cherry trees with many, many different kinds of cherry blossoms for each of the partner facilities receiving our crafts.

Usually I am working with paper for the crafting projects, but this time I decided to try something special and make my sakura out of felt.

I am using 100% wool felt. There is also polyester felt available, which is cheaper, but for environmental reasons I have chosen the pure wool one. Depending on where you are there will also be other brands available, but this is the one I got.

Other things needed for this kind of felt cherry blossoms are a pencil, scissors, a strong thread (I am using a silk thread), a needle and a template for your cherry blossom petals.
The template you can easily draw yourself, or feel free to print or copy mine.

Use the template to cut out petals from your felt.
When you copy your template on the felt using a pencil, try to have as little pencil lines as possible visible on your cut out petals.

Five petals are needed for each cherry blossom.
Taking your thread double (even a strong thread is very likely to break otherwise) thread the petals on it with four stitches each.

Make a knot and pull tight, gathering the felt petals to create a blossom. Make sure to knot the thread well.

From the front your cherry blossom will look like this:

Now you can cut the thread.