Doughnut Pin Cushion Tutorial

Since I made my doughnut collar the other week, I have become slightly obsessed with doughnuts! And this led me to creating my very own doughnut pin cushion! It could actually be used for a number of things, not least just sitting there and looking pretty, but as I have now taking up dress making I have been in desperate need of somewhere to store my pins!

You will need;

• Felt - Brown an Pink (I chose to use 2 shades of brown)
• Matching embroidery threads
• Variety of coloured embroidery threads (for the sprinkles!)
• Stuffing
• My doughnut template which you can download here. Make sure you download it before you print it otherwise it will come out a different size.
• A needle
• Pins
• Scissors
• Beads (optional)

Print out my template and cut it out, then pin it to each piece of felt in turn, and cut out.

When finished you should have 3 doughnut shapes like this;

The pink is going to be the icing, so you need to trim this a little around the edges to make it look like the picture below;

Now pin the pink felt on to the darker brown felt, and start stitching them together with 2 strands of the pink embroidery thread, using blanket stitch. If you aren't quite sure how to do this you can see a tutorial here.

Then stitch around the edge of the brown felt using the matching thread and blanket stitch. Keep it even and as tight as it will go without puckering. You can see a tutorial on how to stitch blanket stitch on an edge here. I'll explain later why we are doing this.

Add your sprinkles! You can use whatever coloured embroidery thread you like here, and even beads if you fancy it! Make sure the fabric stays flat and doesn't pucker as you stitch. 

The next bit gets slightly complicated.  The way we are going to attach the lighter brown felt to make the bottom part of the doughnut, is by using blanket stitch again. But, remember how we stitched around the edge of the darker brown felt earlier? This was so that we would have something to stitch on to, so that we can join both pieces together.  So start with the inner circle and do your blanket stitch, hooking it into a stitch on the other piece of felt each time.  It's quite important that you try to keep the stitches as even as possible to make sure they match up.

Take a look at the picture below to see what I mean. I just used some scraps of fabric to illustrate the technique more clearly to you, the stitches are a lot bigger than you will sew them.

Next you need to stitch the outside circle together in the same way, but once you have done about a quarter of it you need to start stuffing it as you go, so that it is distributed evenly across the whole doughnut. It needs to be pretty densely packed, but make sure your seams don't pop open too far.  As long as your stitches were quite small this shouldn't be too much of a problem. Keep on sewing and stuffing, sewing and stuffing until you get back to the beginning, then tie off and you are done!

Here is what the finished product should hopefully look like;

I'm super happy with how it turned out, and I shall look forward to my sewing projects even more now!  I kind of want to make a whole box of doughnuts this way, but I don't think I have enough pins to necessitate it! Can you think of any other uses they could have?

I think this would make a great gift though, and they could be made in lots of different colours. What do you think?

Laura xXx