Felt Play Food: Maki Sushi

Sometimes I want to sew, but I don't want to sit in my sewing room facing the sewing machine all night. That's when little projects like this are nice - I can sew them by hand and still spend some time with my family, veg out in front of the television, or sit and enjoy some conversation.

The construction of these tuna and salmon maki are pretty straightforward. Each one consists of two coloured squares of felt for the filling, two white felt circles for the rice and a long strip of black felt for the nori.

To save myself from any measuring and/or calculations, I used a cylinder from the kids' shape sorter as my model and cutting guide. It provided a guide to cutting perfect circles and the black felt strips were cut long enough to just wrap around it.


Here are the sushi tops and bottoms (with the coloured felt squares attached) and a completed nori tube before assembly.

Here is a view of the sushi where I've sewn the bottom rice circle onto the nori and have stuffed it full of polyester batting and am putting the finishing touches on it by sewing the top on.

I tried some different methods of sewing the rice to the nori tubes. The one on the left was sewed together with the right sides facing and then turned right-side out. As you can see the edges are more rounded and marshmallow-y in shape.

The one on the right was sewn together with the wrong sides facing and the raw edges of the felt are still visible on the finished product. This resulted in a sharper edge and a little less of the stitching showing. My hubby liked the marshmallow shaped one (on the left) better so the rest of the sushi were finished that way.

My kids had a fun time trying to guess what I was making. Surprisingly, even my hubby had no idea until after I'd sewn the "nori" into tubes and the "fish" onto the "rice". Once they were all done though, the boys had fun "cooking the sushi" for us to eat.