Felting Frenzy

Some folks want to relax on the beach when they have their vacation, take leisurely walks, read a book. When Kara and I recently took our trip to Colorado, having relaxation time was certainly on the radar—but so was taking classes and learning new things. It was our time to fill up with opportunities that aren’t possible during the busy season or simply aren’t available back home.

When researching the trip, I was excited to find something new in the fiber arts arena to try. Wool is always in plentiful supply on the farm (last spring we sheared 500 pounds of fleece from our flock!), and it’s always neat to learn a new and creative way to use it. One project that caught my eye that neither of us had tried before was needle felting.

Felting is a process where the natural scales on wool fiber are worked tightly together to create objects without spinning, knitting, weaving, or crochet. There are basically two ways to felt: wet felting (which uses soapy water and agitation to lock the fibers together) and needle felting (which uses a slender, barbed “needle” to poke at the wool to interlock the fibers. Needle felting is commonly used in commercial machines to create dense wool felt, like what’s used in boot liners. In the 1970’s, people started taking some of those individual needles to create hand-made objects out of wool in forms that would not be possible on a machine.

Wet felting can be messy and unpredictable—better for flat surfaces or shrinking a larger project, such as the knit-and-felt craze of a few years ago. Both Kara and I had tried wet felting in the past (with some success here and there), but the needle felting idea sounded pretty exciting, especially since it used wool roving, which we had in good supply at the farm already.

After hunting around on Google for yarn shops and class offerings, I found a shop in Boulder that was offering an evening needle felting class. Everything else was either happening before we arrived or after we left the area. So yay, there was one option for taking a class! But it had an interesting title: “Voodoo Love Zombies.” So I called the shop, wondering, “What the heck is a Voodoo Love Zombie?”

“Oh, it’s a fun little critter,” the lady answering at the front desk on the other side of the phone explained. “They’re really cute.”

So, skepticism aside, we signed up for the three-hour class. We arrived just a hair late (still learning our way around the city), and snuck into class with six other students. That meant the workshop was full—good thing we’d signed up ahead of time.

The focus of the class was to learn how to needle felt a ball (which became the head) and to work with a pipe cleaner armature (which became the body, legs, and arms), how to attach the head to the body, and how to add features and accents. Most of the project ended up looking alien-like, with a large head and a simple, smaller body. Kara and I both took a look at the prototype and went…ah, nope. In true stubborn farmer fashion, we decided to do our own thing, though we still followed the instructions for the fundamental process.

I’d read up on the artist ahead of time and knew that she did a lot of work in foxes, so I asked if I could learn to make a fox tail for mine. Not only that, I tackled making ears, characture eyes, and a foxy nose as well. Kara spun off on making a gnome, working hat, beard, clothes, and facial features.

But the class was only going to be so long—no staying later to work on these extra details. This meant that while everyone else was felting at the speed of poke…poke…poke, Kara and I were on the far end of the table like little sewing machines going poke-poke-poke-poke.

“Ach, how do you keep it from stabbing your finger?” I asked, pinching the tip of my index to stop the bleeding.

“That’s what the foam block is for,” the teacher grinned. “Only be sure to flip your piece over now and then, otherwise it will felt right into the foam and not want to come off.”

As the class wound to a close, we hot-glued our pieces onto little wooden bases to help them stand up and decorated them with flowers. “Aw, he’s proposing!” the teacher laughed, seeing the purple fox kneeling with bouquet. Everyone was excited about their little critters—pink, white, tan. Some were experienced fiber art creatives, while another lady was a writer who finds learning something new before starting her next big writing project helps her think outside the box.

Packed tightly in our luggage, the little critters and all the needle felting accoutrements made their way home, and I began to collect all my different colored rovings for the next project. After searching online for more inspiring images of needle felted projects, I wanted to try making a chicken with real feathers in the tail. Poke-poke-poke…three evenings were filled with wrapping, holding, twisting, layering.

And it worked! Mr. Chicken, who started as three pipe cleaners and a pile of wool fluff slowly morphed into a miniature rooster with a fly-away tail and little feathers at the tips of his wings. Glass beads added wimsical eyes. Cute! More experiments to come, certainly, and evenutally we’ll be able to host our own classes in needle felting. If you’re a felter, we do have wool roving in the shop, hand-dyed from our wool.

Keep learning new things, and we’ll see you down on the farm sometime!