Friday, March 6, 2009

Love to Needle Felt

One of my favorite things to do is needle felting. I struggle to make time for it, which is really frustrating since it is so fun to do. I began several years ago with a kit I got on Ebay:

It didn't have quite enough of the blue roving for the background but I like it anyway. I used it on my table at a craft show to fill up some space and could have sold it several times over. It's not that it's a fabulous piece. It happened to be the Mt Bruce Sheep & Wool Festival and people were buying everything that had anything at all to do with sheep.

My next needle felting effort was a figure. Now before you say it, NO, it's not a squirrel. It's a chipmunk.

Sorry if I sound a bit sensitive, but I thought it was a perfectly good likeness of a chipmunk. Everywhere I take it, poor 'Chippy' is called a squirrel. He lives behind the glass doors of my secretary -- far, far away from my wire haired fox terrier, Maggie.

For Christmas I decided to make a gift for each of my friends in our quilting stitch group. Now, I'm never one to plan too far ahead and this was no exception. I got the idea for making felted pins the night before our gathering. I used some felted wool that had misbehaved when I was making a bag, cutting out 3" circles from it. Using various pieces of loosely spun wool yarn, wool roving, and felted wool nuggets from laundering many felting projects, I proceed to needle felt designs for each gal. Some pins were embellished with antique glass buttons, others were plain. Here are some pins I made while demonstrating needle felting for the Black Sheep Knitting Guild meeting last month.

I really do enjoy needle felting. To me, it's very relaxing and freeing. You just select a beautiful piece of roving and start punch, punch, punching away. I've got a pretty healthy assortment of roving, most of which I've bought from local people at the Spinners Flock fiber sales.
One thing to remember -- never look away while you're needle felting. A poke from the needle it truly painful. Ask me how I know!

It's going to be a rainy weekend after a high today near 70 degrees. I think I'll have plenty of opportunity to get something crafty done.


1 comment:

MichTKH said...

Suzanne, I love the chipmunk ... he's adorable. And clearly not a squirrel!

Tracy