Quite a while ago I saw this lovely felt barn that Kristinasstyle on Instagram made and I knew I needed to make one too. I found the pattern at Little Softie Shoppe on Etsy and immediately bought it. However I accidentally only bought the animals, so asked if I could update my purchase to include the barn and the lovely owner of the shop sent me the barn for free. Customer service excellence!

When I got my Cricut I began reviewing my soft toy patterns to see which ones including the SVG files needed to be cut on the Cricut and was overjoyed to discover this pattern again. I was also pleased to find all the felt in my stash. There are quite a lot of pieces to cut out, including some soft foam for the walls and roof of the barn. I cut it out, and then couldn’t deal with the way I was storing embroidery threads, so got them all sorted and I was ready to go.

As an aside, I used the Cricut to cut the shaped thread holder cards for storage. I used a cornflake packet for the card, so these cost me nothing. I got 100 thread holders from one cornflake packet.

Once I had done this I could get back to making the barn. This really is an easy make, but it has a lot of steps. The instructions are excellent and it probably took me five nights to complete the whole thing, which is completely hand stitched.

As usual I didn’t manage to take any photos during the construction phase, so all of these are of the finished toy.

As you can see the barn has a handle for a small hand to carry it around. Each side has windows and/or doors. Mine might look wonky as I made this whilst watching tv – not ideal! All sides of the barn have soft foam inserted. The foam is supposed to be 3mm thick, but I only had 2mm so I doubled it, glueing the pieces together. I really didn’t want my barn collapsing the the extra thick foam has certainly done the trick.

the inside is really charming. There is a hay rack and a water trough sewn on the back wall.

When the barn is opened up, the front wall and roof has a path and a pond sewn on. The animals live inside when it’s not being played with.

I used velcro on the tabs instead of buttons and buttonholes as Miss G can operate velcro but buttons are currently beyond her.

The animals don’t stand up on their own, which I was a bit disappointed about until I’d finished the whole thing and now I don’t mind at all. A little person will probably hold them and move them around anyway. I managed to make them look like they were standing up.

As you can see, I have a chicken, a sheep, a donkey, a cow, a pig and a horse. The patterns have most of the facial expressions the same, but I decided to play with a couple of mine and I think they look more interesting. I may make another set of different farm animals. I really want to find a small duck to sit on that pond!

When I finished it, Mark told me that i should make one as a handbag. Here is me trying to see if that would be feasible. Obviously I wouldn’t sew windows and doors on it!

Your end of post treat is a little different today – it’s my grandson playing with the tummy time roller I blogged a few posts back. I was concerned that he would have grown past needing it. He’s not quite five months and is commando crawling everywhere, so he crawled over to it for a little play. Thanks to his Mum for this video