My mother-in-law gave me a needle felting kit for Christmas, along with some supplemental fleece. I had long admired needle felting but expected my reaction to wool would be even worse if the wool was in loose form and there were pointy implements involved – but this fleece was from llamas!
I was nervous about diving right into the loose fibers, though, and after looking at some projects online I thought I’d try needle felting with acrylic felt, the sort that comes in sheets. It works pretty well, although I expect the fleece will be easier to work with, in part because the fibers are longer.
Here’s my first try:
Here’s the second:
Here’s the third:
For that third one, I felted the orange squiggle down from the top, and then the hot pink backing up from the bottom. That gave it its hot pink hairs.
Earlier this week I went to White River Yarns for a needle felting pen, with three needles. This was partly so I can work a bit faster when I start on the actual fleece, and partly because I’m pretty sure the acrylic felt is ruining the original two needles.
It’s ruining the original backing material also, because I have to stab really hard!
As a final acrylic try before moving on to llama fleece, I wanted to try to make something three-dimensional. I started with a square that I rolled into a cone, and it reminded me of the paper that’s rolled around bouquets. I thought I could make my husband a bouquet – he brings me quite a few – so with a long thin strip I rolled a rose. That was enough to fill the tissue paper by itself, so I felted it into place and left it on Matt’s place at the dining table.
