Felt and Vinyl Spring Ornaments

Easter is just around the corner and what better way to celebrate than with some handmade decorations? In this machine embroidery project, we'll be creating adorable Springtime or Easter ornaments using a combination of felt and glitter vinyl.

These ornaments are not only fun to make, but they're also perfect for adding a touch of Easter cheer to your home or gifting to friends and family.

With the help of your embroidery machine, you'll be able to create a set of these charming ornaments in no time. So let's get started on this fun and festive project!

Learn more about these Felt and Vinyl Spring Ornaments by watching our video or keep reading this article.

WHAT YOU NEED for the felt & Vinyl Spring Decor Ornaments

Find links to purchase these products at the end of this tutorial.

• Sweet Pea Machine Embroidery Designs - Felt Spring Decor Ornaments Design
• Shimmer & Shine Vinyl Applique Kit
• Felt
• Tear Away Stabilizer
• Embroidery Machine
• Thread
• Embroidery Scissors

About the Felt Spring Decor Ornaments Design

This machine embroidery design is by Sweet Pea Machine Embroidery designs and is called “Felt Spring Décor Ornaments”. The design comes with a full photo PDF tutorial that will guide you through making these cute in-the-hoop springtime ornaments. Needlepointers is a proud affiliate of Sweet Pea Machine Embroidery Designs.

The ornaments are made with felt and are quick to stitch with your embroidery machine.  The stitching time is around 10 minutes per ornament but with the trimming and finishing it took me around 30 minutes to complete each ornament. 

This is an in-the-hoop project so the ornament is completely stitched in the hoop. After the ornament is stitched all that remains is trimming around the outside and removing some basting stitches.

The design from Sweet Pea comes with five ornaments as shown in the photos: bunny, tulip, daffodil, sheep and lilacs.

The vinyl applique is not required for this project.  You can easily use felt scraps for the entire ornament.

By incorporating glitter vinyl and metallic threads into the felt spring decor ornaments' background, they become more vibrant. I discovered that vinyl works well either as part of the background or on small areas of the design.

Tips for working with the Glitter Heat Transfer vinyl

We were gifted this Shimmer & Shine Vinyl Applique kit by Designs in Machine Embroidery to try out.  The kit contains three pieces of glitter heat transfer vinyl and three matching Kingstar Metallic thread spools (1k meter).

If you would like to purchase just the vinyl, please scroll to the end of this page for links to buy the glitter vinyl from the Siser store on Amazon.com.  

Needlepointers.com is a DIME and Amazon affiliate, which means we earn a commission when you buy through our links, so thank you in advance!  This helps us to keep bringing you new content!

This heat transfer vinyl can be used on a variety of machine embroidery projects and cleanly tears away after the stitching is completed.  The project can be ironed from the back to adhere the vinyl to the fabric.

For a quick tip on stitching with metallic threads, please follow the link.

Tips for Using the glitter heat transfer vinyl

Tip #1: Before using the glitter heat transfer vinyl, peel off the clear carrier sheet.

After stitching the placement stitch, cut a piece of vinyl larger than the area to be stitched, remove the clear carrier sheet and place it over the placement stitch so it goes beyond all edges of the stitching.

Tip #2: Do not remove the excess vinyl after the tack-down stitch. Wait until after the satin or final stitch is complete before tearing the excess vinyl away.

When stitching machine applique embroidery with fabric, the normal steps are:

1. Stitch Placement Stitch
2. Cut a piece of fabric larger than the area of the placement stitch and place it over the area making sure it extends past the stitches.
3. Stitch the tack down stitch
4. Use curved embroidery scissors to trim close to the stitch line.
5. Stitch the satin or finishing stitch to cover the edge of the fabric completely.

When working with the glitter vinyl, the steps are the same except steps 4 & 5 are swapped.

I found that if I removed the excess vinyl after step 3, tack down stitch, then the vinyl would pull away from the tack down stitch and not be covered correctly by the satin stitch.

To keep this from happening, stitch the satin stitch and then remove the excess vinyl around the design.

Tip #3: The excess glitter vinyl will tear away cleanly from the outside of the design.  Place your hoop on a flat surface and start to tear it away by putting a finger in the center of the vinyl and then pulling near the edge.  Make sure you aren't tugging so hard that the project comes out of the hoop.

Tip #4: The glitter heat transfer vinyl can be ironed from the back to adhere the vinyl to the fabric.  If you are using the vinyl on a t-shirt or other garment,  iron it after stitching is complete.

Tips and Steps for making the Spring Decor Ornaments

I have some photos of the steps used to make these ornaments below along with basic instructions.  Please refer to the PDF tutorial from Sweet Pea that is included with the design for the FULL instructions.

These steps and instructions are included to preview the steps in making the ornaments.  I hope these will help you to see how these in-the-hoop projects are stitched and give you the confidence to try one yourself!

Steps 1 - 3: Batting and Ribbon Hanging Loop

The first step will stitch down the optional batting.  The batting isn't needed when stitching these ornaments on felt so I skipped adding the batting.  

I still stitched the step in order to have a placement stitch for the felt. 

The second and third steps stitch the placement and tack down stitches for the ribbon hanging loop to keep it in place.

Step 4: Baste the felt in place

Place the felt across the hoop making sure it extends over the previous stitch. Use a contrasting thread for this stitch since these stitches will be removed before trimming.

Do not trim the felt!

Steps 5 & 6: Stitch the Placement line and tack down the vinyl

The next step will stitch the placement line for the background felt or vinyl.

Cut the vinyl or felt to be large enough to cover the entire stitch area. 

If using vinyl, remember to remove the clear carrier sheet before placing it.  See the tips above.

Stitch step 6 to tack down the vinyl or felt.  

If using felt, trim around close to the stitch line.  For the vinyl, leave the vinyl untrimmed until after the satin or final stitch around the circle is stitched.

Next Several Steps: Stitch the design

Each ornament is a little different in the next several steps.  These steps will stitch placement and tack down stitches for the small felt pieces and any other embroidery stitches.  The instructions included with the design will step you through the stitching for each ornament.

Below is the finished daffodil before adding the backing felt.  The excess glitter vinyl has been removed after the whole daffodil & leaf were stitched.

The lilac below shows the design stitched and the vinyl has not been trimmed yet. 

Then the vinyl is trimmed by carefully tearing it away from the stitches.

The Final Two Stitch Steps

The next step is to turn over the hoop and place the backing across the hoop and tape it in place.

Place the hoop back into the embroidery machine and stitch the basting stitch.  This will hold the back in place.

The final stitch will triple-stitch around the edge of the ornament.

Remove the two rows of basting stitches from around the ornament.

Carefully trim around the ornament.  Don't cut the hanging loop!

The ornament is completed.

These ornaments will look nice hanging around your house.  Maybe hang them along your mantle!

We hope you enjoyed learning about these Felt Spring Decor Ornaments by Sweet Pea Machine Embroidery Designs.

Some other machine embroidery projects you may be interested in are:

• Free-standing Lace Projects - 10 tips for completing free standing lace machine embroidery projects.
• Mouse Cat toy
• Peekaboo Bunny and Chick