... and a 'Stab' at Needle Felting (!)

When we went to the Creative Stitches and Hobbycrafts Show recently, we treated ourselves to a great needle felting kit by The Frame Workshop and Molten Designs and used it to create a variety of our own designs!

Needle Felting is basically a way of fusing wools & fibres together onto a backing fabric, usually a felt. The kits we bought came with a selection of felt, threads, wools and foam block along with the all important felting tool.

A summary of the instructions supplied...

• Place a piece of felt onto the foam block
• Lay some Merino Wool onto the felt first. It is best to use less rather than more - you can always add more as you build the design up. Blend your colours together. 
• Push the felting needles through so that it ‘fuses’ the wool to the backing felt.  It is best to use a straight up and down motion when needle felting. 
• Build your design up gradually and remember that you can either cover the whole of the felt or leave areas of the background showing through. By felting with the Merino Wool you will see that you can cover the area quite quickly. 
• Add further texture, interest and colour contrast to the piece with random silks, threads, yarns etc. Continue to embellish and add until you are happy with the result.

As this was completely new to us, we thought a practice piece was a good place to start!

This was so much fun and we couldn't wait to get started on our actual pieces! Simi went for a design of a superb starling and Sian for a woodland landscape.

Here they are in progress....

... and the finished versions!

Then we got carried away and each made another little something!

It was great to learn a new technique and find out how effective it can be to create all sorts of different pieces. We can't wait to try lots more now!!