Felt Toy Camera Tutorial and Pattern-my first completed Christmas gift for the year!

Today I finished my first completed Christmas gift for the year.  It is a felt toy camera for W.  W loves cameras.  DH and I both take a good many pictures, so he often wants to imitate what he sees.  For a while he played with one of  my old cameras, but I didn't like how he became obsessive with it.  I find that old cameras/phones etc do not make good toys at our house.  He also had a plastic one that his Nana gave him at Easter, but we don't really do plastic toys and it of course broke fairly quickly and was discarded.  This leaves him trying to take my camera of DH's camera when he wants to pretend to take pictures which is simply not allowed.  Yesterday, I came up with the idea to make a soft camera for him out of wool felt and wooden buttons and decided to create a pattern and tutorial.

Here is the pattern.

Supplies needed:   Three colors of wool felt
                              1-1 inch wood button
                              2- half inch wood buttons
                              a scrap of wool yarn
                              coordinating embroidery floss
                              wool batting or fleece

Step 1.  Cut out pieces of wool felt according to the pattern.


Step 2.  Blanket stitch three largest circles together to make lens piece.

Step 3.  Blanket stitch the two small rectangles to make flash.

Step 4.  Position and pin lens, flash and small circle to front of camera like this and blanket stitch into place.

Step 5.  Sew buttons onto lens and circle on the upper right corner.

Step 6.  Blanket stitch small circle of color A and other small wood button to the piece of Color B that will become the top. (sorry I didn't get any pictures for this step).

Step 7.  Blanket stitch the screen onto piece of Color A that will be the back of the camera slightly off center.

Step 8.  Pin and blanket stitch front, top, sides and back together to form a box.

Step 9.  Fill with wool batting or fleece. (I used bits from a wool fleece that I accidentally partially felted while trying to clean it a while back. Glad I held on to it. It worked great for this purpose.)

Step 10.  Finger knit a wrist strap out of wool yarn.  I think I made about a 8-10 inch piece with long tails.

Step 11.  Thread tails of finger knitting onto needle to push through side of camera.  Remove needle and repeat with other tail. Then tie the two tails together snugly on the inside of camera.

Step 12.  Pin and blanket stitch bottom piece onto camera.

Enjoy!