Needle Felting

There are now a lot of excellent websites offering information and supplies for this 'new' hobby, and I have no intention of offering anything but the bare essential information in an effort to try and courage you to have a go.

Not long ago few people had ever heard of dry, 3-dimensional needle felting, but thanks to the internet and internet groups, a lot of people have found out how fascinating this can be. For a change, the cost of the equipment is comparatively small. In fact you can start with as little as one needle, one small bag of wool and a foam pad.

The Needle: There are several sizes of needles and the difference between them is the length of the needle, the position and number of the tiny barbs on it.

The Wool: I cannot tell you exactly what this wool is, and there are a lot of websites that will gives you lots of information about where it comes from, the differences between the various animals and what are best for what purposes, as well as the variety of shades and colours you can get the wool in.

The Foam: An essential piece of the 'kit' - basically it is just a pieces of very dense upholstery foam about 3"- 4" thick and it can be as small as 3" square but a piece nearer 6" is better.

Method: It sounds easy, basically because it is. All you do is to poke your wool with the needle. What happens is that the barbs on the needle matt together as you push the needle in and pull it out.

Danger: The most important thing to remember and to be aware of all the time is that these needle are VERY SHARP and they will hurt if you poke yourself or anyone else with them! This is the reason for the foam block. Your wool is placed on the foam, and you poke, and poke hundreds, perhaps thousands of times. The more you poke the more the fibres matt together the firmer the item gets.

Initially people who tried this found they could only make one item at a time and recreating it was almost impossible. I think that perhaps now, if you have had enough practice, it might be possible to make very similar pieces.

This is what I managed to make the first time I picked up and had a go with a felting needle.
This is what I made when I tried to follow instructions from an instruction leaflet I bought. The good thing about needle felting is that you can make thing larger by adding more wool and felting it into place. To try and make things smaller, you can condence by needle felting more and matting the fibres together. In fact it is surprising just how small something can get when you start with a larger ball of the wool!
This is a little Yorkie dog that I made using a sausage shape for his body and a flattened ball for his head and just carried on poking and adding fibres to see if I could get it to look like a photo I had seen.

I found that making one of anything was not difficult, the problem came when you had to make two of something. You have to have the same amount of fibre, felt it in the same shape, density, width and length and this, dear reader, is something that I have not been able to do so far!