This technique requires the use of a barbed needle to mesh fibers together, commonly using wool roving through fabric, felt or even batting to create designs or landscapes or..., and you can use it to make dimensional embellishments such as felted tube beads. It's fast, fun and easy to do. Equipment is simple - a barbed needle, a dense foam block to punch into and your roving and fabric base.
Needle-Felting - Annette
Annette chose to create a daisy-like flower, stem and leaf using this technique. She then added a ribbon bow and hand embroidery. She has button-hole stitched her light green background to a navy base which is then finished with a buttonhole stitch.
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| Annette
Needle-Felting - Sandy
Sandy translated her fascination with snowflakes into a needle-felted version of these snow crystals. She started with white felt as a base for the felting, then added her sky full of snowflakes in different sizes and shapes.
Sandy
Needle-Felting - Claire I was inspired by a needle-felted landscape that Donnie had shown me that she had made sometime ago. I decided to make a landscape myself and started with a piece of Hobbs Heirloom Cotton batting as my base and felted three trees with shaded trunks to it. I added a grassy area littered with rocks and flowers and placed some wisps of blue in my sky. The piece needed to be stabilized and framed, so I fused the felted batting to a layered brown batik quilt. After stitching around the edges of the felted batting to firmly hold it in place, I stitched around the outer edges of the brown quilt which was then pinked and the piece is finished.  |
Needle-Felting-Sue
Sue built her needle-felted butterfly on a background of muslin which was then mounted on green felt. Her small butterfly in the upper left corner has gossamer wings made from sheer silk petals and the body is a wool tube. The wool bead in the upper right corner is surrounded by embroidered rays.
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| Sue |
Needle-Felting - Donnie
Donnie has three layers of fabric to her piece. First, she did her needle-felting through a piece of muslin (top layer). She layered her felting in the larger circles which adds more depth to the circles. Then she hand stitched the felted muslin piece to a black wool border (second layer) and finally secured it all to a layer of white felt (third layer/backing)
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| Donnie
This is the first of the two pieces that Donnie has felted. She created this needle-felted landscape of trees growing from a tumble of rocks with a patch of sunny sky in the background before our group started on this project and it needed to be included here.
Needle-Felting - Joyce
These are supposed to be "pods" of some sort. I drew a pattern on paper, then stitched through the paper with thread nearly the same color as the background so I would know where to felt what color. Then tore off the paper. Several colors of wool roving make the outer parts of the pods while the center is black. The long black line running through is wool needlepoint yarn felted in. The light part around the black was left un-felted and I put ricing stitches in to resemble seeds in the pods, some are straight lines, some are random. The black seemed very stark, so I added a few French knots in the thread used for ricing. I think I don't care for the ricing, but the felting is interesting and may have other uses.
Joyce
Needle-Felting - Candy
Candy started with a sunshine yellow background and laid her sand in the foreground and added blue water. Now she could "grow" her tree trunk and sprout her leaves felted with a few colors of green roving. The coconuts add dimension and color and her sandy beach is scattered with beach grasses.
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Candy
Nice work Claire. I'm still working on learning to post comments. Sue
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