Felt Snowflake Tea Wallet

Thank you to everyone who joined in with us here at The Pleasant Times for the Snowflake Week! It was so much fun looking at your posts. We were tickled to get such a nice response!

Since we began with a tea, we'll end with some tea to take home, in a snowflake-themed tea wallet!

 I have made this tea wallet a couple of times.  There is another version of the tea wallet in felt here.
This is the way I did one recently to give as a gift to a tea lover, with snowflakes on the front and the back:

The "ingredients" are felt (I used pink), contrasting felt (I used white sparkle), a snip of ric-rac (you could use ribbon), a shank button and some tasty tea in individually wrapped bags!

 Using small paper snowflakes as templates, I traced them on to white sparkle felt, folding in half to cut them out, and reserving two little hearts for use inside the wallet. You could do all kinds of applique designs on this project!

 The size of this wallet is 8 inches by 5 inches. Cut one piece out of pink felt for the front cover. If you do not mind it being a thicker wallet, you can make one piece for the front and another one for the inside, lining or backing this one. It makes it a bit easier and hides stitching. I wanted mine to be less bulky, so I did without.

 Cut two 2-inch by 8-inch pieces for the inside pockets.

 Hand-stitch the snowflakes carefully on the front (and what will be the back once it is folded), hiding the long thread stitches & knots behind the snowflakes so they do not show on the back of this piece. I tacked the flakes down at all corners, with a few tacks around the middle. All you should see on the back of this piece are a few small stitches holding the snowflake on.

 Turning the piece over, take a  small 2-3 inch piece of sparkly ric-rac and fold and stitch to the inside  right edge.

 The first skinny rectangle is placed on the large piece,  about 1 inch from the bottom. Hand-stitch to the large piece, just along the bottom edge. I stitched very carefully through this piece, and barely through the larger piece to keep the thread from showing too much on the front (this is where it is nicer to have two separate large rectangular pieces, but if you are careful you can get this on without stitching through the snowflakes on the other side.)

 The two little white hearts are stitched on to the remaining skinny rectangle...

...that is then laid over the other sections. Pin all this together, stitch down the middle, and then all the way around the edge (going over the stitching of the ric rac) about 1/8 inch. The neat thing about doing this in felt, is that if the edges are a bit uneven (for instance, if they shift during stitching), you can trim them!

 Here you can see the edge stitching, and the middle stitching.

Finally, sew a button to the front right side, fill with tea bags, fold the wallet, and pull the ric-rac loop around the button to keep closed.


I hope these instructions are clear; feel free to email me if something is not working! -Editor