November 13, 2023

Tea Party Craft: Felting--Part Deux

The moment all 5 of you have been waiting for! Tutorial Part Two: Dry or Needle Felting! I'm going to embellish the piece of felt I made yesterday in my sink. To refresh your memory, click HERE.

When you last tuned in, your hero (uh--me!) left you with something that looked like this:
Now I'm going to explain as best I can in words and images, the craft of needle felting.
First you need a felting needle.
What it is essentially is a pointy needle with tiny barbs on the end of it, poking out of the sides. You can buy them at AC Moore craft store in the knitting section, or here. They're fairly inexpensive, but you will need a few. Some have coarser barbs and others have smaller, closer together ones that are used for more detailed, tinier sections.

Here's my stash, stuck in a ball of felt inside an old silver punch cup.
Once you have a needle, you really should have a chunk of upholstery foam to lay the felt on while you're poking the needle into it.
I just hold the felt in my hands, but you're likely to poke yourself, which I often do. I just forget to pick one up when I'm at the fabric store.

Here's that felt again. I started molding it into the shape I wanted while it was damp.
When it dried in the morning, it kept its shape. One might call this "blocking" which is what knitters do to shape their knits. See my Entrelac Headband post.

To begin, you need some wool, roughly twice the size of the design you want to add to your piece of felt.
I want to make polka dots on the larger piece of felt, each about the size of a pea, so I took a chunk the size you see above.

Next, I twist it up and wrap it around itself into a circle for the polka dot.

Then lay it on the felt where I want it to go. With my coarser felting needle, I start punching into the wool, connecting it to the larger piece of felt behind it.
What's happening is that the barbs are connecting the fibers, bit by bit. You bring the needle in and out, pulling the fibers together. It's as if the fibers are being sewn together with the felting needle. When factories are making commercial-grade wool felt, they use large machines with hundreds of these type of needles to adhere the wool together.

Here's the felt with green dots. Each one took about 2-3 minutes.
I added more dots in blue and magenta, and then turned the felt back into that circular shape and needle-felted it together, forming a tube. The final result: a coffee or tea cozy for hot paper cups.
I'd like to add some embroidery when I get a chance. Sorry I didn't have a paper cup on hand to model this. I thought about cutting the edges down, but I like the raw, organic line that it creates. I did roll the top down a bit, since I just liked how it looked.

This is what the inside looks like. You can see the colored wool fibers poking though to the inside.
As you can imagine, the possibilities are endless. I've seen needle felted dolls, animals, ornaments, and embellishments of all time. Just do a search for it and you'll find tons of examples.

Hope this post made sense, and that maybe you'll try needle felting sometime!

10 comments:

  1. Fun! I love felting, but don't have the space in our apartment. Sadness... Thanks for sharing

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  2. I have definitely wanted to try needle felting, and your posts make it seem so easy! I love when you show your crafts.
    I also love your blog layout!
    I'm not just saying this to enter Angie's giveaway, I really think it, but I may not have left the compliment if she hadn't suggested it. Good for her!

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  3. I want to come over and play!!! You always have the coolest projects and make them look do-able, too...

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  4. Gorgeous and amazing! Love it.
    Thanks for sharing your talent.
    Cindi
    jchoppes[at]hotmail[dot]com

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  5. This is on my list of 1,000 things to do before I die. Not a very exciting list, I'll admit.

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  6. What a cute little cup holder Kathleen! You made me smile.
    It really does look fun and as (my) luck would have it, I'd be happy doing the little beads or balls. All you gotta do is scrunch them up, right? I love the idea of the balls with little dots and wavy stripes on them for ornaments.
    If I add another thing to my craft room, the floor shall cave in. This one is duly noted as "things I really want to learn to do".
    It's been delightful. Thank you for sharing one of your talents with us.

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  7. I am a felting failure, yet your posts give me the desire to try it one more time.

    knittingmomof3 (AT) gmail (DOT) com

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  8. Ok, Kathleen, that is very very impressive. I gonna be on you when my husband has to start paying for yet another hobby. I already am a scrapbooker and stamper, lol, and heaven knows neither one of those are cheap hobbies. I would really love to try this, though. Thanks for sharing it with us. Are you going to do any more posts on it? by the way the cup cozy is toooo cute.

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  9. You are my hero! How cool is that, now I'm going to have to start ANOTHER hobby! Thank you!

    Gabrielle

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I'm a good listener...comment away!

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