Handmade Jesse Tree Set Tutorial (in expert, intermediate, and novice versions)

There's still time before Thursday at 9pm Pacific to enter to win the giveaway. (To enter by leaving a comment on the original post go here.) The giveaway is over, thanks to everyone who entered! In case you didn't win, some of you wanted to be able to make your own, and asked for a tutorial. So, here goes . . .






If you have an iron and a pair of tiny scissors you can do this. Seriously. It is not hard, it just takes time and patience and lots of very small cutting.




Supplies:

• 1/2 yard of felt, cut with pinking shears into 48 3.5 inch diameter circles
• scraps of cotton fabric for the appliques
• embroidery floss
• ribbon
• stuffing
• Thermoweb Heat'n Bond Ultra Hold Iron-On Adhesive-17"X36"
• small, sharp scissors like embroidery or nail scissors
• pinking shears

At Catholic Culture, I found all 24 readings, and the suggested symbols for each one. Then I went into publisher and google image search and found clip art I wanted to use for each symbol. You should be able to access the clipart I used here.

Then I recreated the pictures from the clipart in layers of fabric and ironed them on to the felt circles.

To do that, I ironed the Heat 'n Bond adhesive onto the fabric scraps, then pinned the clipart picture to the fabric and cut out each piece as I needed it. If I had multiple layers I found it helped to have printed multiple copies of that picture. Once all the tiny pieces were cut out, I layered them on a felt circle and ironed them down (it just takes a few seconds to fuse, so it shouldn't melt the felt).

Then I put a blank felt circle on the back and whip stitched the two circles closed, stuffing a little stuffing in when I had an inch or two of stitching left, and attaching the ribbon at the top.

Here's what each symbol looks like in fabric:



You should be able to access each of these photos individually in this google+ album.

Then I went to Shutterfly and made a small paperback photo book with a photo of each ornament and the reading for that day.

It looks like this: