This tooth pillow has a loop to hang from the doorknob or a night table drawer knob, so the Tooth Fairy doesn't have to do the hazardous groping under the beneficiary's pillow. This is pure gold. Pure GOLD, people.
So I finished my oldest's tooth pillow (Ballerina Fairy, per request) and I thought I'd repost the basic
pattern with a better tutorial to go with it, because I made a couple of adjustments to it. (If you are interested in viewing a boy version, here's my first tooth pillow, the
Tooth Officer.)
The pattern does not include things like the crown or skirt or accessories. Those are basic shapes you can make yourself with no big problems, hopefully. If you want more inspiration for embellishment you can see
these pillows too. The pattern now includes the basic cheek and teeth shapes.
So here we go. You'll need:
- My pattern printed twice on 8.5 x 11 paper or cardstock
- Felt for tooth, pocket, cheeks, little teeth, and any accessories you add, like the crown and ballerina skirt.
- Ribbon for the hanging loop
- Buttons for eyes
- Fabritac or other fabric glue
- Matching thread, embroidery floss, etc...
- Optional pipe cleaners for wings
- Poly stuffing
1) You've downloaded this
New and Improved pattern and printed it out twice on 8.5x11 paper, right? Alrighty. Cut out the teeth and cheek shapes if you want to use them. Cut out the large tooth piece from one sheet and the pocket piece from the other sheet. Also cut out and discard the pocket area from the large tooth piece, so that you create a window. You'll use this to trace the placement of the pocket. Ok? Ok.
2) Trace the tooth pattern twice on felt. If your felt has a more pleasing side to it (like mine did), be sure to flip the pattern over for the 2nd piece. Trace and cut out a felt pocket piece (in my case, I chose light pink*).
*Note: Be careful if you choose a darker color for the pocket piece -- it may show through and give your tooth five o'clock shadow. Not good if you are a Ballerina Fairy.
3) Use your window template to trace the placement of the pocket on the wrong side of the front of the tooth with a disappearing marker. Mark the slit for the mouth also.
4) Cut out some felt teeth for the mouth pocket if you like, using the teeth pattern piece included. Glue them centered and aligned with the top edge of the pocket piece. It always cracks me up to think of a tooth that has teeth.
5) Before you cut the mouth slit, I
suggest you also straight stitch all around the slit with matching thread to keep the mouth from stretching out (see photo below).
(this is a photo of a different tooth fairy pillow, but you can see the stitching around the mouth)
6) Add a line of fabric glue all around the edges of the right side of the pocket. You DO NOT want gaps you could lose your kid's tooth through, so be sure to make a continuous line of glue all around the edge. But not so much glue as to get real gooshy. It's a fine line. Place the pocket on the wrong side behind the mouth using your traced line for placement. Be sure the teeth are centered and showing through the mouth slit. I've also been known to whip stitch around the pocket too, being careful not to show the stitches on the right side, just for added peace of mind.
This is what the mouth looks like on the outside after you glue in the pocket. Mark a slit in the back piece for turning. Just a straight line down the middle of the back, about 3 inches long. Straight stitch around it before cutting it, just like the mouth. This makes it easier to work with because the felt edges don't stretch during stuffing. This is something I
figured out after doing this tutorial.(In the photos, just ignore the fact that I forgot to cut my slit until after I sewed the tooth together).
8) OK, here is where I differ with a lot of crafters. I like to embellish the face after the tooth is sewn together and stuffed. But if you prefer to do it before, then now is that time. If you want to see the face I did, skip ahead to peek at step 16. Stop here and put on the eyes (if you use buttons, be sure your tooth pillow is not for a kid under three, blah blah blah), cheeks (pattern piece included), eyebrows, and whatever else you'd like to have on your Ballerina Fairy, like
pointe shoes. Much easier to do shoes at this stage, right Jess? I skipped the pointe shoes. Too lazy.
9) Place the strap. Make sure the loop is long enough to hang over a doorknob. Center the strap on the back piece as shown and pin in place. Make sure it is out of the way of the seam allowance before you sew. Learned that the hard way.
10) Pin the front and back right sides together with the strap sandwiched in between. On deep curves I find it helpful to trace the seam with a disappearing marker. Experienced sewers may scoff at this. But it sure helps me. Sew a quarter inch seam all the way around the tooth, backstitching to secure.
11) Trim and notch the curves. I just used my pinking shears and trimmed pretty close to the seam so that notching was not necessary except between the tooth roots. At this point I clued in that I'd forgotten to cut the slit in the back, so I had to be very careful not to cut my strap while I did it.
12) Now the fun part: turn it inside out and admire your silly looking deflated tooth. (yours will have a face if you already did that part)
13) Now stuff that baby. You'll notice as you stuff the tooth the mouth will pull open a bit. That's all good. If you get worried about the mouth becoming misshapen with repeated use, you can do like I did and dab the corners with some FrayCheck. I always think of
Alex Krycek on X-files when I say that. That's just the wonder that is me.
14) After your tooth is at the ideal poofiness, hand sew the slit in the back together with some matching embroidery floss or thread.
15) If you are making a Ballerina Fairy, you will cut out the felt skirt at this point. It's just a couple of concentric circles, the outside one cut with pinking shears. My skirt was a circle 7 inches in diameter, then I cut another circle out of the center for the waist.
To get the size of the center circle, I measured around my stuffed tooth's waist, and it was about 13.5 inches. I'm too lazy (and hopelessly right-brained) to figure out the formula for calculating diameter from circumference, so I took a measuring tape around one of my smaller embroidery hoops, found it was close to 13 inches, and then used it to trace a circle in the middle of my skirt. I cut it out and tested the fit on the tooth, adjusting slightly as necessary.
Then I cut another skirt the same size so it would have a double layered tutu look. I glued the two skirts together just around the waistband, then used big basting stitches to attach it to the tooth from the underside, being careful my stitches didn't go through my tooth pocket.
16) Now on to the face for me. Not for you if you already did that in step 8. I attached buttons for eyes and gave her some rosy felt cheeks and embroidery floss eyebrows. Next step was to cut out a little crown shape from gold felt and glue it to the top of the tooth just in front of the strap. Then I stitched it down for security.
17) Last step was the optional wings. I took two silver pipe cleaners and folded them in half, and tacked them onto her back with glue. That didn't look fairy-ish enough, so I added two smaller wings underneath by doing the same thing, only with shorter pipe cleaners. Then I sewed them down with matching embroidery thread. Voila.
What's really weird is I found out my good friend
Jessica's daughter requested her own tooth pillow Ballerina Fairy at the same time, so our kids must've been channeling from some snaggle-toothed girly collective unconscious. Weirder still, when I found that out by chance, Jessica and I had both already made one unsatisfactory version and were each working on Ballerina Fairy Tooth Pillow 2.0.
Creepy. In a good way.
image from RevoluzZza
