A wild and woolly tangent!

Needle felting. Had no idea it existed until August of this year.

The de-stressing qualities of this craft are probably what hooked me first. Using small barbed needles and quantities of various shades of wool to make small felted sculptures is a quick description of what’s done. The results are SO very satisfying!

As I mentioned at the top, I started working wool in this way in August 2022 so I’m currently a relative newbie. Every small creature or figure built so far has been satisfying in slightly different ways. It is an easy hobby to dive straight into and it does help if you have some artistic skill and a good sense of proportion in dimension, but is not absolutely necessary in order to enjoy the make!

The wool is available in varieties of colors and some are eco-friendly dye colors and others the natural color of the sheep. Wool is probably the easiest to felt but the medium is not limited to fiber just from sheep. Alpaca is a popular fiber though a little trickier to felt as it is a little slippier… and other fibers such as silks are also used. My experience so far is just a tiny portion of the needle felting spectrum of possibilities and I am excited to learn more! The gallery shows what I’ve created thus far (at least those I wanted to share… there are some failures, but not many as it is a really forgiving process and even the failures can be fixed with a little more work and some occasional “surgery” and reconstruction.

The foxes toward the bottom show the difference from first to second tries – newbies often find that their early figures are way too big and disproportionate – and the difference between the two fox figures is one striking example of this! Using armatures for the figures like the felt Mr. Zip, the squirrel, sheep, pig, mouse, and both foxes gave them more stability (and they can be posed, to an extent) and that is another learning curve for a newbie that has its own challenges!