Succulents are one my favorite accents at weddings, so I thought I’d try my hand at creating a felt succulent that could be used for your table decor! I created a pattern for cutting out felt in shades of green and painted a clay pot with chalkboard paint so the finished potted succulent could be used as a table number, centerpiece, etc.
If you’re feeling crafty and enjoy working with felt, this is a fun and relatively easy project, and the end result is pretty adorable. Have fun!
What you’ll need –
- Clay pots (about 3″ or larger)
- Chalkboard paint and chalk
- Hot glue gun
- Sheets of felt in shades of green
- Scissors
- Green buttons
- Freezer paper and permanent marker
- Iron
- Downloadable succulent templates
- Elmer’s glue
- Paint brush
- Floral foam or styrofoam
How to make it –
First off, get your clay pots painted with chalkboard paint so they have plenty of time to dry. I used Krylon® Chalkboard spray paint in black. This is useful if you need to paint quite a few pots; however, it is prone to dripping a little, so if you want an absolutely perfect painted surface, you may want to get chalkboard paint you can apply with a paint brush.
Once your pots are painted and set aside to dry, you can start working on the felt succulents. I used three shades of green felt from Rainbow Classicfelt – Pirate Green, Olive and Kelly Green.
Print out the templates I provided and trace the shapes onto the paper side (not the shiny side) of the freezer paper with a marker.
Cut the shapes out of the freezer paper (more specific directions on template). To easily cut them out of the felt, place your freezer paper stencil shiny side down on the appropriate felt color, turn an iron on low heat and iron the paper for a few seconds. The freezer paper stencil should be sticking to the felt, so you can cut out the shape with sharp scissors, peel off the paper stencil and repeat as necessary.
Now that you have all of your felt shapes cut out, it’s time to stiffen up the felt a bit. It’s probably a little floppy now, right? I’ve found that if you thin out plain old Elmer’s glue with water, you can brush it on to the back of the felt shapes with a paint brush. Once the felt dries, it should be a little less flimsy.
So, at this point, you should have all your dry felt succulent shapes ready to go. Heat up your hot glue gun, and assemble them from largest to smallest (bottom to top) by placing a dot of hot glue in the center of each layer. Be sure to rotate each felt piece a little bit so the tips of the succulents look natural.
The next step is gluing your button on top! Now that your succulent is completely assembled, you can affix it to your chalkboard pots. I had some floral foam hanging about, so I just cut a small piece to stuff inside the pot and then dabbed a bit of hot glue to affix the succulent to it. You can use styrofoam balls from the craft store, too – just cut the foam to fit in the top half of the pot and be sure the succulent more or less rests right on top.
The last step is to draw or write whatever you’d like with the chalk! Enjoy, lovelies!
