People who know me in real life know that I love cakes, especially cupcakes. (On a related note, I might start uploading my cake designs too, when I get more.)

On a trip to Hobbycraft in Solihull, I picked up this “Felt cupcakes and cakes” kit. It supposedly has all the materials you need plus instructions to make three types of cakes. You just need to provide a few extra tools.

So this kit provides pre-cut pieces of felt, four colours of embroidery thread, a sewing needle, stuffing, and instructions to complete the pieces. All the pieces that are required to complete each cake are bundled separately, so you can separate the projects and not get mixed up.

An odd thing that I found whilst making these cupcakes; some pieces of felt were missing, notably the two fruit slices and the large felt piece in the cinnamon roll, so I have to improvise the design slightly.

Extra tools are required, and these are only shown on the instructions inside the packaging. Slightly inconvenient, but most crafters have these tools at their disposal to begin with as they are quite common.

PVA glue is required to stick the pieces together; if you’re good at slipstitching, you could probably opt to sew the components together. PVA, whilst not very viable in the long run, just makes the process easier for a beginner. It required a lot of glue and time to make sure the components were fully secure though.

Most steps are labelled with pictures to show you what the item should look like. You only need to know running stitch and overstitch to sew everything. Interestingly, this cupcake picture below does not actually look like the one on the front. Freedom of creativity?

Some steps said to “cut out the cardboard shapes on the inside of the packaging and glue to the felt”. Er, what cardboard shapes? The inside was blank. I had to draw my own shapes out.

It did say to reinforce the cupcakes with cardboard, but after cutting stuff out, I felt that the cupcake would look more “natural” plushie-wise if it didn’t have cardboard in it. So I discarded my shapes in the end.

When you sew the strawberries, you have to make seeds by sewing French knots. This was new to me and quite annoying to do, especially when the thread likes to knot itself when being pulled!

The polka dot cupcake and the cinnamon roll require a LOT of overstitching. I tried very hard to keep the stitches evenly shaped and spaced out.

This here is cupcake one: the wavy-base cupcake! It has a ribbon, a cherry, a dollop of pink cream, a fruit slice, a cigarillo and a strawberry atop a pink cake with a wavy base.

This here is cupcake two: the polka dot waffle cupcake! It has a waffle, a fruit slice, a cherry, a strawberry, a ribbon, and a dollop of pink cream atop a red cake with a polka dot base.

And this is cupcake three: the cinnamon roll cake! It has a dollop of red cream, a cigarillo, and two strawberries, atop wavy pink cream lining a cinnamon roll.

What do I think of this kit? It’s not bad for a starter. But it lacks a few pieces, which I found kind of odd. Still, the kit was £5, so it isn’t bad at all; it’s quite good actually. After finishing, I still had plenty of stuffing and embroidery thread!

Once you see how the pre-cut shapes form the components and the tricks to it, you can start buying and cutting your own felt shapes, and create your own cupcakes. So if you want to get into sewing, this is pretty good. And they are pretty cute!