Felting!

About 8 months ago I was introduced to needle felting. I thought it was a cool fiber technique and planned on purchasing an 'embellisher' or 'needle felting machine'* when I went to the Sewing Expo in Puyallup in February. Shortly before the expo my trusty old Bernina started acting up so I decided to buy a new Janome embroidery machine instead. So, needle felting was put on the back burner.

Over at FAT we are just finishing up a "Giving Tree Leaf Trade", making felt leaves. This gave me the reason to revisit needle felting and  I decided to try doing it by hand. Of course I still needed to purchase supplies, which are the top two photos...wool roving and the very sharp needles and a brush on which to 'do the deed'! LOL!! 

For this project I decided to make my sheet of felt from which to make the individual leaves, so I took the roving and just started punching it together...I learned that it takes small amount of different colors that are sort of 'taffy-pulled' together to mix them and then put them to the needle. The next picture is the felted sheet...the colors are kinda off but you get the idea. The 4th picture is one of the leaves before the beads and being attached to the base;  the last one is a final leaf. 

One of the cool things about felting like this is that the scraps can be re-felted into a new sheet. This is only one technique; most needle felting is accomplished by felting wool roving (or almost any other fabric) into a base fabric. I have also seen needle felted animals but haven't explored exactly how that is done...yet!

Thanks for stopping by!

*an embellisher or needle felting machine looks like a sewing machine but doesn't have any thread or bobbin!