My sister-in-law loves a local Japanese restaurant and we recently went there to buy her a birthday gift. Unfortunately, they were having computer troubles, and couldn’t activate any gift cards. So I asked for a take-out box, and put on my thinking cap to came up with an unexpected way to gift sushi money instead.

This also happens to be a fun way to make play food for your favorite tiny sushi chef. Wanna make some? Here’s what you will need:

Felt in dark green (nori), white (rice), medium green (avocado) and other colors for your sushi filling. Various shades of orange, green and purple would work for veggie sushi. How about orange micro pom poms for salmon roe? I didn’t have felt in a salmon color, so I went with two different pinks, one solid and one striped.

A note about the felt: My dark green and white felts are the thin craft store variety. The pinks and medium green are from felted wool sweaters and about .25″ thick. If you are using thin felt for your sushi filling, you may need to cut your strips longer than mine. I don’t want you to end up with sad, skinny sushi rolls!

Cutting mat, quilting ruler and rotary cutter – if you don’t have these, you could make paper templates of your sushi pieces, pin them to the felt and trim using scissors.

Fabric scissors and pinking shears

Hot glue gun and glue sticks – alternatively, you could sew each section together using thread that coordinates with your felt. If I were making this for a very young child, I might go that route.
Nah. Who am I kidding? I would still hot glue it.

Optional:
If you would like to present your sushi in a tray, ask for one at your favorite restaurant, or just save and wash the tray the next time you buy take out. A perfect reason to have sushi for lunch! If you’re making this for a child, use a plastic tray, not aluminum. Those sharp edges will CUT you!

Also optional:

• Patterned papers in coordinating colors
• Paper trimmer or ruler and scissors
• Tape runner
• Paper restaurant menu and gift card holder

I made twelve pieces of sushi. For each piece, I cut:
Striped pink felt to 1.25″ wide x 1.75″ long
Solid green and solid pink felt to 1.25″ wide x 3″ long
Dark green felt to 1.25″ wide by 5.5″ long
White felt to 1.75″ wide by 10″ long

Using pinking shears, trim a scant 1/8″ from both long edges of the white felt.

Begin folding or rolling and gluing the filling pieces. Glue sparingly and toward the center of the pieces, so the glue doesn’t ooze out the ends of the roll. Next, glue the filling pieces to each other.

When glued together, the filling pieces should roughly form a circle.

Glue one end of the white strip to the filling and wait for the glue to set. It should hold securely because we’ll tug on it in the next step.

Wrap the white strip around the fillings, pulling it snugly to form the roll. Keeping the edges aligned, dot underneath the center of the strip as you work. Gently tug to tighten as needed.

Keeping the glue toward the center of the strip, glue the end to secure.

Next, butt the end of the dark green felt strip against the white strip end.

Glue and roll as you did the white strip.

And there you have a sushi roll! Repeat as many times as necessary to fill the container. This next step is totally optional. I created a label by matting the restaurant’s logo from the takeout menu with two coordinating pieces of scrapbooking paper, and a snippet of their gift card holder. Adhere using a tape runner. To complete the gift, I tucked cash underneath the sushi and popped the lid on top.

With or without a label, this gift would be charming tied with with a pretty bow and chopsticks.

I hope you enjoyed this little tutorial. If you make this project, I’d love to see it! Send your pictures to me at arthurized dot home at gmail dot com.

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