Thora’s Birthday Crown

Thora will turn one this Wednesday and to celebrate, I wanted to make her a keepsake felt crown. I saw some nice ones on Etsy that I took some inspiration from, and then remembered that Jessica had written a Waldorf felt crown tutorial a loooong time ago so I started there.

I bought my ribbon on Etsy – a good search term is “floral jacquard ribbon” – and used that as my color scheme. My local Waldorfy store had some lovely 100% wool felt sheets and I bought colors that matched my ribbon. I highly, HIGHLY recommend splurging on the nice 100% wool felt. This project would have been way harder and looked a lot less nice if I had used the cheapy stuff.

Using Jessica’s pattern, I lengthened the pattern piece B (the crown part) vertically by an inch or so because I wanted to make sure there’d be enough room for the name oval and the ribbon, and I cut the pattern piece out on the fold so I didn’t have to stitch the bottom together. I also made the middle point a weensy bit taller than the side ones because I liked how that looked.

Using my computer, I found a font I liked (and now I can’t even remember what it was called – it started with an L) and typed Thora’s name using it. I held a piece of paper to my computer screen and traced the letters onto a piece of paper, cut them out, then used the paper as a stencil to trace the letters onto a sheet of felt. Then I painstakingly cut out every letter using a teensy pair of embroidery scissors. (I do have a Cricut and there is probably a way to use a Cricut to cut the felt but I’m not very experienced with it yet and it seemed more trouble than it’d have been worth so I didn’t try it.) I Tacky glued the letters to the ivory oval and then blanket-stitched the oval to the front of the crown.

Then I looked up “felt flower” tutorials on Pinterest and found ones like this and this and used one of my accent colors for the flower. I used Tacky glue to actually glue the flower spiral together and then embroidered some French knots in the center to give it some character.

For assembly, I followed Jessica’s instructions for the elastic strap and ended up stitching the bottom of the ribbon onto the crown, sewing up the sides of the crown to trap the elastic band between the felt layers, and then sewing the top of the ribbon on. That way, I had the crown all stitched together except the pointy parts at the top, meaning I could attach all my decorations to the front piece and then have the stitches hidden when I sewed it to the back piece.

After I stitched the flowers on, I wanted to use the blue and orange accent colors so I cut out some little orange circles and blue hearts and stitched them on, kind of under the flowers so they felt like one whole group.

Once all my decorations were on, I machine stitched the pointy parts of the crown closed. Voila!

There are a few things I’d do differently, like using 1″ elastic for the back vs the… 1/2″? I had on hand. Either that or make the casing way smaller. The elastic tends to twist around in there and I find that annoying. I’d also maybe match my casing fabric to my crown better, but ehh. Small potatoes. I’m really pleased with how it came out and I’ve had several people tell me they want their own or that I should take commissions!

Happy first birthday, Thora! I hope you like your crown.

File Under: Crafty, Thora

Tagged: No tags