It’s April! Which has nothing even remotely specific at all to do with fortune cookies, but they seemed a fun thing to make. I’ve seen these felt fortune cookie creations all over the internet, made for Chinese New Year parties or Christmas or Valentine’s Day or pretty much any other occasion.

I like to geekify things, and it occurred to me that Mario has at least a couple of phrases that are very obviously well-suited to the tradition of handing out short and to-the-point fortunes and bits of wisdom. (I’m not saying that the repurposing of these phrases is in any way original, just that it’s thematically appropriate.) So I thought I’d see how Mario mushroom felt fortune cookies would turn out. The answer? Brilliantly. I think I’ll start a box of Mario-themed decorations etc, for the day they finally declare a national holiday for the game. Seems like a far more interesting celebration than Presidents’ Day, after all.

Below are instructions for normal, everyday felt fortune cookies, as well as for the Mario mushroom version.

Also, at the end of the post I’m doing a giveaway. Find out how to enter (via a comment) to win a box of random stuff!

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What you’ll need:

• 2 colours of felt (for the Mario mushroom fortune cookies you’ll need green, white and red felt)
• thread to match one of your felt colours (for the Mario cookies you’ll want white)
• wire
• needlenosed pliers and wire cutters
• paper
• pen
• small bowl or other round object
• straight pins
• sewing machine OR hand needle
• superglue

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Putting it all together:

Here’s how to make a basic felt fortune cookie. Instructions for the Mario mushroom fortune cookies are almost exactly the same, and any different or extra instructions for making them have been added to each step in italics.

1) Trace and cut a large circle out of each of your felt colours. Find a bowl or jar or lid about the right size to trace for this – about 4″ (in diameter) is the size I used.

For the Mario cookies, cut a large circle from red or green felt, and one from white felt. Then cut four smaller circles from white felt. These smaller circles should be about an inch across. Tracing the bottom of a spool of thread will get you a circle about the right size.

2) If you are making Mario fortune cookies, complete the next two steps. For normal fortune cookies, skip to step 4. Pin the four small white circles around the edges of your large coloured circle. Be sure to keep the small circles at least 1/4 to 1/2 inch away from the edge of the large circle.

3) Use a hand needle to sew the small circles in place, OR, using a zigzag stitch (a) on your sewing machine, with a medium stitch width (b) and a low stitch length (c), sew around each small white circle.

Tip: It can be hard to really effectively knot the thread on a zigzag stitch without doing a boatload of backstitching (which looks messy on something this small). To deal with this, I zigzag stitch all the way around, backstitch a bit, then (making sure my needle is out of the fabric) I switch to a straight stitch, and sew a few stitches forward and a few stitches backwards on top of the zigzag stitching, to hold it all in place.

4) Pin your two large circles together, then sew around the edges. Leave a gap of about 1 inch to 1 1/2 inches un-sewn. I used a sewing machine, of course, but you could also sew the circle by hand.

For the Mario cookies, be sure the side of the coloured circle with the small white circles sewn on is facing inward, so the small white circles are sandwiched between the two larger circles.

5) Turn the whole thing inside out, using the tip of a chopstick or pencil to poke out all the edges and make them smooth.

6) Where the gap is, fold the raw edges inward and stitch the gap closed with a hand needle.

7) Set your circle down with the colour you want to show on the outside facing down. Cut a piece of wire slightly shorter than the diameter of your large felt circle. You may want to use your needlenosed pliers to fold the ends of the wire over, so the sharp ends don’t poke out. Lay the wire across the middle of your circle.

So for the Mario cookies, make sure you lay the wire on the white side of the circle.

8) Cut a narrow strip of felt the same colour as the felt your wire is lying on. Make the strip just slightly longer than the wire, but not longer than the circle’s diameter. Then, using your superglue, glue it down on top of the felt. Let it dry.

9) While the glue is drying, cut some strips of paper and write fortunes on them. I tend to go less for the touchy-feely and more for the silly or sarcastic. Or the Mario-themed. You can even write a few lucky numbers on the other side of the paper. 42, 37 and 1337 do seem the obvious choices.

10) Roll up the paper a bit at one end, then lay it across one half of your felt circle, beside the wire strip, with a bit of the paper hanging over the edge of the circle.

11) Fold the circle in half along the line of the wire. Then, using the wire to bend and hold the felt in shape, fold it in half again and you have a fortune cookie! You can fiddle with it a bit to get the shape just right.

And who says it’s unlucky or unwise to go around eating strange mushrooms? Hah!

 

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GIVEAWAY

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In keeping with the theme of random fortune, and in getting with the theme of spring cleaning, I am giving away a box of random crafting stuff. Some of the items are crafts I have made, some are crafting supplies, and some are… well… you can just be surprised. On the inside of the box lid, I have written a number between 1 and 100. (I wrote it after taking the photo, so don’t bother trying to look for it.) To win this random box of questionable goodness, simply post a comment with your guess at the number. The closest guess made before next Friday wins the box! Only one guess per person, but you can guess the same number someone else has. If there are multiple correct or identical closest-to-correct answers, I’ll simply draw a name from amongst those guesses.