Needle Felting

I thought I had tried everything in creativity, at least the ones that interested me.  One day my daughter sent me an email about painting with wool.  I have used a drop spindle to spin roving, knitted, and made some lovely tapestries on my homemade weaving looms.  My looms are beautiful too and work very well. I have even cut snippets of yarn and glued on wood to make paintings.

So, since I have all the wool and equipment - the only things I needed were felting needles and a pad, which I bought - I decided to try wool painting.  You may have seen in my first posting my Gypsy Muse, just a little doll I quickly made to try making a doll.

I watched you-tube videos, downloaded a video and afterwards decided to just try it.  Here are my needle felting projects so far.

 

 

 

 

 

I used prefelted wool for my canvas. I punched the wool roving into the canvas to make the art.  Since then I have learned that you do not need a prefelted wool fabric to start because you can use roving to make your base canvas. I have also made some prefelted fabric which is beautiful small swatches of wool in various colors. You can add any type of yarn to your art as long as you put a wisp of wool over it so that it will stay in place when you wet felt your work. 

There are many explanations on how to wet-felt. I used two pieces of bubble wrap (small bubbles), laid my work on the bubble side, sprayed it with warm soapy water, put the other piece of bubble wrap over it, rolled it rather tightly; tied two knee-high hose around the ends and rolled it over and over (like you are rolling dough) many many times; unrolled it, turned the art (didn't turn the prefelt fabric pieces because shape didn't matter) and rolled many times again.  You can check the work by trying to pull on the fibers and if they don't separate from the canvas, you have felted it.  For my prefelt fabric, I just roll it enough to let it form a lacy looking fabric. Very beautiful - now to decide what to do with it.

These are some of the prefelt fabrics I made.

 

 

This is the start of my next project.

Hope you will visit again to see the finished artwork. You can see the yellow pin cushion beside of my Gypsy Muse. The pin cushion was the first thing I needle felted.   

 

If you ever have questions about a process I used, please contact me and I will be glad to explain what I have learned.

/DebR