3d Needle Felted Penguin

Spoiler Alert:  I did it!

After playing around with some 2D needle felting, I felt that I was ready to attempts a 3D project.  (Gulp!) I even got a new tool to help me with this project. I think that this Clover Needle Felting Tool will help me prick my own fingers less. With 5 barbed needles the felting should be a little more even. (At least this is my hope!)

I picked up a 3D felted penguin kit at the Stitches Midwest expo last fall.  The kit contained all of the fiber I would need, but didn't come with the foam felting square or any felting needles.  (Hence the reason I picked up the 2D felting kit since that came with a needle.)   

This project started with wrapping a bunch of wool around my finger.  Sounds easy enough! 

The new tool is amazing foe this large surface area!!  Although I suppose I should have wrapped it tighter.  The nice thing is that I'm not seeing holes like I did with the single needle.  I'm getting a nice evenly felted surface.  

The base was easier than I thought.  I just make sure to reshape as i move along  Pretty cool, right? 

3D needle felted items are very sculptural.  I was expecting to have a lot of problems with this because I don't do well with free formed crafts.  This is why knitting is great for me, there is some order to what you are doing and it is therefore repeatable.  Embroidery and needle felting?  Time will tell.  

I used the long single needle to secure the oval stomach to the piece and then my new 5 needle toy to make it flat.  The single needle goes much deeper, and is better for precise placement control.  

 

When I was done, the penguin front was fairly flat.  Looking good so far!  

Time to make the beak.  When making the triangle, I was wishing that I had made the penguin front a little shorter, or removed some of the yarn so I could make the beak even smaller.  In the end, I do like the cartoonish look to the nose.  

The feet are not my favorite part of the sculpture...  but still pretty cute overall.  They were felted flat separately and then attached to the bottom  

Now it is time for the hat and the scarf.  I hope that I can do this piece justice. 

 

The instructions give very good tips, such as rolling the strip of fiber for the scarf in your hands before adding it to the penguin.  This helps keep the shape more even.  Brilliant tip!

I had a lot of trouble securing the pompom to hat.  I decided to secure to to penguin side and have less crease and more flop.    It is still precariously attached to the penguin, but since this is an ornamental decoration rather than a toy, hopefully people will not touch it too much.  

This is a project that took an afternoon and was a lot of fun. I could see kids getting into this, kids who are old enough to use the tool without cutting themselves. I can see myself making many more needle felted embellishments and ornaments in the future.  I haven't started looking up patterns of things to make, so do you have any suggestions on where to find needle felting instructions?

More 2D Needle Felted Creatures

After I completed my first ever 2D needle felting project, a Purple Seahorse, at the end of the summer I had enough fiber left over for at least two other creatures.  This time I'm not going to share step by step photos, but just give you a sense of what I did.   (If you want those check out my felting of the Seahorse, I documented that very well!)

For the Seagull, I tried layering on some more colors at the beginning to see what would happen.  I put down a full layer of purple, then a full layer of pink for the initial felting.I focused a bit more on felting at the edges of the cookie cutter so there would be better definition around the corners of the ornament.  I then layered a tiny bit of yellow on top for an accent.  I love the way the colors show through!

For the turtle I wanted to use up the rest of the fiber from the kit.  I layered some yellow and pink on the bottom and then covered it with the remaining purple.  (I didn't really want the yellow or pink to show through very much, but needed them for thickness.)  I then tried to space out the decorations a bit to make the shell different from the turtle body.   I used black on the head, legs and tail and then teal and the remaining stellina on the shell.  I LOVE how it came out!  

Now I just need a penguin cookie cutter and to hand dye some fiber and I can make a purple penguin ornament to go with my collection.  Do you like my little 2D felted ornaments?  

Needle Felted Sea Horse Ornament

When I was at Stitches Midwest 2013, I got to try out needle felting for the first time.  The felting process went WAY more quickly than I could have ever expected.  I knew immediately that this was something I wanted to explore further when I got home, so I picked up a fun ornament kit from the Esther's Place booth.  (I got this kit primarily so I could have a foam block and needle for felting a 3D penguin from another kit I purchased, but I wanted to get some additional felting practice before attempting this more complex project.)

  

The directions look pretty simple.  First I will be making a plain purple base out of the dominant color provided.  I'm not sure if there was variation to the color when I purchased it, or if it faded a bit in the sun, but either way I am excited to get to work.  The one thing I really don't know is how thick I need to make my piece of felt.  I started with 6 g of fiber total.  I also knew that I wanted to hold some purple back so that the other colors wouldn't dominate my piece.  For the first pass, I filled the cookie cutter with fluffed up fiber and still had plenty of purple left over.  

It didn't take a lot of poking before it got really flat.  Once again, I was amazed by the speed which the needle felting needle felts the fiber.  

After the first pass on one side, I actually have something that resembles a sea horse.  You can see a lot of holes from where the needle has gone through, but maybe this will be resolved better as I proceed.  

When I flipped it over i decided to add a little more purple fiber to the back because it looked thin in places.   When I flipped back to the RS again I tried to really focus on the points so I could get some more definition from the horns and back fin.  

I mixed some of the black, purple and blue fibers with the sparkly bits to apply this in some spirals to the top of the sea horse.  We'll see how it comes out!  

The Stellina (sparkly bits) was sticking up all over the place so I needed to add some more fiber on top.  I added a really thin layer of purple to help felt these unfeltable fibers down.  

I removed the cookie cutter and it looks great!  Before picking it all up i used my needle to focus on the edges a bit to help define them.  

The backside is so fuzzy!  I also went around the edges on the backside to help make things more secure.  

I'm not sure if all felted 2D ornaments need to be this thick, but my first ornament certainly looks sturdy. 

Now all I need to do is add a loop so it can be hung from something!  (And use the extra fiber to make up some more needle felted ornaments.)  I have some fun cookie cutters that I got with my mom this summer so I think that I will use up the fiber from this kit really quickly.  

The final piece weighs 2 g and is 5" long.  

Stitches Midwest

I have an awesome husband.  He took me to the Midwest Fiber and Folk Fair for our anniversary at the end of June and happily looked through all of the fiber and yarn with me.  In mid-July, I realized that Stitches Midwest was coming up in August.  I hesitantly mentioned that there was another fantastic yarn expo to him, expecting him to sigh and say that he JUST took me to one... but to my surprise as soon as I mentioned another expo this summer he responded, "Awesome, we should go!"

Stitches is a much bigger fiber event than the Midwest fair and draws amazing teachers from around the country.  There were many classes that tempted me (both design and dyeing), but between CFS and pregnancy (30 weeks as of the time of the event) I'm just not comfortable driving myself 50 min for a full day event only to have to drive myself home.  This is why Vogue Knitting Live Chicago worked perfectly for me because I could take the train downtown.  Unfortunately Vogue Knitting Live this year is taking place 2 weeks after my due date, so I won't be attending!

I failed at my yarn diet for the year (I blame it on the pregnancy), but I am still trying to be good about adding fiber to my stash.  While at this expo I was looking for things that would catch Keith's eye so that I could make a special project for him.  While I didn't come home with any yarn, I did come away from the expo testing out two new fiber based techniques: Needle Felting and Tunisian Crochet.

Keith tried needle felting, too!

At the needle felting demonstration in the Esther's Place booth, we got the chance to make felted beads.  This was the first time I had ever tried needle felting and I loved it!  In fact, I liked it so much that I purchased two little kits to bring home.  One of the kits includes the foam piece (to protect yourself) and needle.  I will be making a 2d purple seahorse ornament from the first kit and a 3D penguin from the second.  I hope I can do this new craft justice.

 

The second new craft was tunisian crochet.  I have been curious about this technique that is a combination of knitting and crochet, but with just one long crochet hook.  You crochet and keep many stitches on the needle in one direction, and then in the other you "cast off".  The most basic stitch gives a really nice pattern, as you can see on my lap below.

I can see this being a technique I explore more in the future.  I know that KnitPicks sells crochet hooks that can screw into the interchangeables needles set, so I think this would be a perfect chance to fill in my collection of hooks at the same time as plying with a new way of stitchery.  

If you have never been to a yarn expo, I highly recommend it.  It is certainly worth the admission fee, even if you aren't planning on purchasing a lot of yarn!