Friday 15 March 2013

Because we FELT like it :)


Tuesday was FOG day and Jill, our talented needle-felting member, first gave us a demo of the types of wool, yarns, tools and tricks of the trade used in needle felting. Jill normally works in 3D so started us off with making a ball that turned into a rather frightening little monster. I can see that these would be a favourite with kids.

As we would not likely use these monsters in a fibre arts piece, we also tried our hand at making a 3D flower.

We spent the rest of the time experimenting with needle felting a variety of fabrics and fibres into other background fabrics. Diane was most creative with her butterfly. She had been making a pair of socks and didn’t like the toe so cut it off and needle felted into some wool fabric.


We enjoyed the day so much and could certainly see the potential for our fibre arts projects so we have decided to take a trip to the Carstairs Woolen Mills to buy more wool roving and dedicate part of our April FOG day to working with this medium again.  It might be advised to update your tetanus shot as the potential for sticking yourself with the felting needles is quite high. Ask us how we know!

2 comments:

  1. I like the idea of 3D flowers. I think I will make flower center pieces for my birthday party. Where can I get the instructions?

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  2. Sharon, we did not have any written instructions, only directions from Jill on how to manipulate the wool roving and the technique of dry needle felting to make our first flowers. The small pink one with the four petals took me the best part of an hour to make so I'm not certain that dry needle felted flowers would be the most time efficient way to make multiple flowers to create a centre piece. I googled Felt Flower Tutorials/Videos and found some very neat flowers to make from commercial felt squares. They only require scissors, a glue gun or glue, a needle/thread and perhaps a button for the centre. I've just spent an hour and have a few quite nice samples. I’ll post these samples later. NOTE: Many of the tutorials for felted objects are for wet felting.

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