Create a Miniature Felt Play Garden for your Peter Rabbit Play Set

If you love the classic story of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter, I’d love for you to join me as we bring the characters to life. In this article, I’m going to show you step-by-step how to make a miniature play garden for our Peter Rabbit play set using wool felt, cotton batting, and hot glue. It’s sized perfectly to go with our miniature carrots, lettuce, and radishes and can be made on its own (a little matchbox garden would be so cute!) or as part of a bigger set like I’m working on. (Our little suitcase play set will include all of Mr. McGregor’s garden- veggies on one side, and flowers on the other.) You can check out my YouTube video for a full video tutorial on this project!

Introduction: Overview of the Miniature Felt Play Garden

In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to create a play garden for your Peter Rabbit play set. I’ll be adding this felt veggie garden on one side of Mr. McGreggor’s garden that I’m putting together for my Peter Rabbit doll. But you can easily make a stand-alone veggie garden using the same methods. We’ll provide a step-by-step guide with photos and a video tutorial to help you create this fun garden space.

This project would be a great way to get kids involved in making a play set, but supervision would be required for younger children.

What You Need to Make a Mini Felt Play Garden

In order to create a play garden for your Peter Rabbit play set, you will need the following materials:

Brown wool felt
cotton quilting batting
hot glue (I love this detail tipped glue gun)
container (I used a mini play suitcase, but any container could work. A match box, an altoid tin, etc)
Mini vegetables- you can use our free patterns for carrots, radishes and lettuce

Step by Step Tutorial for Making the Play Garden

How to make a miniature felt play garden:

1. Roll up ‘logs’ of cotton batting and secure with glue. Make them about as thick as your mini veggies (mine is about an inch thick)

2. Cut your batting logs to size so they fit into the container you’ve chosen for your play garden. I want mine to fit onto one side of this mini suitcase, but you could fill the entire container if you choose.

3. Once the batting logs are cut to size, roll them in a layer of wool felt. I chose a nice, rich coil colored brown. Secure with hot glue.

Tips and Tricks for Making the Play Garden

When rolling your batting for the garden rows, don’t worry about getting things too tight. A little bit of squish will allow the vegetables to fit in and out of the rows easily.
Using a glue gun with a fine tip will allow you to add glue as needed without having too much gush out of the edges. (I like this one)
If a bit of glue does ooze out of the edges, you can still work to clean it up a bit. Larger bits can be left to cool and then pinched off. Smaller bits can be melted into the felt using the warm tip of your glue gun.
Silicone mats are a great way to protect any surface from hot glue. I love placing one in my work station when I work with a glue gun.

Video Tutorial for Creating the Play Garden

In this video tutorial, we’ll show you how to create a play garden for your Peter Rabbit play set.

Conclusion

I hope this tutorial on how to create a play garden for your Peter Rabbit Play Set has given you the confidence to go out there and make something special. With just a few simple materials, you can easily create a world of magic for your little one.