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Welcome to the new felting thread! We had a previous one about four years ago but it's in archives now and I thought it was about time we had a new one. What is needle felting? Needle felting is a craft where you take industrial needles like these:  and unspun wool like this:  and you stab the wool with the needles until it turns into something like this:  If you want to get fancy, you can felt around pipecleaners (or other wire) and make things like these:    If you want to get very fancy you can make things with almost lifelike detail, like this person or this person. How does it work? Wool has special fibres which lock together when you stab them enough, so literally the entire craft consists of stabbing wool. You stab wool to shape it, you stab it to compact it, you stab it to join it together. Keep stabbing it until it's the shape you want, or cut bits off and start over again! It's a very forgiving medium, and one that you can make cool poo poo with almost instantly as soon as you start playing with it. Forums user flavor.flv summed it up in the previous thread like so: I'm glad there's finally a felting thread because it's easy and it barely costs anything to get started. It's more like sculpture than anything else, there's no patterns to follow and no little pieces to cut and keep track of. If you want to make plushies and find sewing is a bit too intimidating, give felting a try. You can fix any mistakes you make and you can put in a lot more detail than anything that requires a needle and thread. Aren't those needles uncomfortable to hold? The needles are designed for machines, not human hands. Thankfully you can get needle holders which give you a nice handle to grip. Some are even designed to hold multiple needles at once so you can felt bigger projects faster. How can I get started doing this? Since it's still a kind of obscure craft, it can be difficult to find the materials at your average craft store. I recommend buying a beginner kit online. That should come with some wool, some needles and instructions on a project or two to get you started (although there are no patterns involved and if you're brave you can make your own stuff right from the get go). What are all these types of wool? Most felting wool is either tops/roving or batts. Roving is wool that is ready for spinning, so all the fibres go the same direction and it comes in ropes. Batts come in sheets and have fibres going everywhichway, which is much faster for felting. "Core wool" is undyed coarser wool which is cheaper than dyed wool good for building up shapes quickly but which might not be as nice for the outside of a project. In terms of sheep, merino is very fine and soft but takes a long time to felt and is therefore mostly good for putting colours or details on the outside of a project. Other types of sheep like jacob, corriedale or romney have coarser wool which is great for core wool and which some people like to use on the outside of the project as well. Personally I like the smoothness of merino mostly but a lot of people hate it because it's slow going to work with, so it's worth experimenting and seeing what you enjoy! Most beginner kits will come with merino wool. What's up with all these different needles??? Needles come in different gauges, ranging from about 32 for the biggest to 42 for the smallest. They also come in different shapes, which refers to the number of sides the needle has and the shape of the point. As a very general guide, 38 gauge is good for general working and building up shapes and is the most common needle found in kits. 40 is very good for smaller projects/details/adding on colour to an existing project. Personally I swear by 40-twist needles and use them almost exclusively except for the very very beginnings of a project, but a lot of it is down to personal preference and what type of wool you're using and what sort of projects you like to make, so it can be worth buying a bunch of different needles to try out if you find yourself getting into the craft. The new hotness in general working needles is 38-star-twist, which means a 38 gauge needle with four sides (instead of the usual three) and those sides are twisted to form a spiral. The four sides mean more barbs on the needle so it felts faster, and the twist part means that it leaves smaller holes as it goes. Stabbing things sounds very therapeutic It is. And you get better at not stabbing yourself as you go, or at least not stabbing yourself hard enough to draw blood. Can I talk about wet felting in this thread? Sure! I know pretty much nothing about it so I'm not going to talk about it but since there isn't a thread for that either, go right ahead.
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Mar 28, 2021 04:44
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| # ? May 6, 2024 08:30 |
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Neat thread! At your request i'm yeeting it over into Crafts and Hobbies...
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Mar 28, 2021 12:03
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Thank you! Momentarily forgot this subforum existed.
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Mar 28, 2021 12:52
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I 100% cannot pick up another hobby right now but I just wanted to post to say that the OP is fantastic and goddamn those felted animals all own.
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Apr 11, 2021 11:25
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Thanks! I made most of them but the chocobo is by forums user flavor.flv. I will say that it's a very easy cheap hobby to get started on! Wool and needles are very cheap! Very fun to do in front of the TV, that's why I picked it up as a hobby. Although it is better to do larger rounder projects in front of TV rather than ones with long skinny bits as that's when all the self-stabbing happens.
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Apr 12, 2021 14:45
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I'm so happy to see this thread, I just bought a book on needle felting the other day that has a bunch of patterns in it. Now I just to gather the supplies and get started!
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Apr 12, 2021 21:33
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I am visiting from the knitting thread and have never seen needle felting before but I do have a handful of felted knitting projects in my one-day-I’ll-try-this list. These look amazing and this is definitely something I’d like to try one day, despite having no talent for sculpture or art. What kind of structural strength do the finished objects have? Like if I dropped the parrot on the ground am I looking at a fully deformed mess of fibre or maybe just a couple of small bends to put her back in shape?
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Apr 12, 2021 21:55
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Needle felting is one of my favourite hobbies! I like needle felting video game characters (usually Animal Crossing villagers) and other such things. Here’s a Merengue from AC that I felted for my wife, that also serves as a fully functional Amiibo: I got lazy with the base, and she was originally supposed to be standing until I realised I forgot to account for her being top heavy (this is where wire armatures come in handy), but I otherwise like how she turned out! The finer details like her eye were tricky to do though, as I didn’t have the variety of needle sizes at the time as I do now. Here’s one I made of one of my Neopets! She was only my third felting project, and I felted wool onto some cut pieces of magic eraser to make her wings the shape they are.   I don’t have anything super recent to share sadly, other than a WIP of my TF2 Pyro loadout. I hate felting eyes as they always come out wonky, so I made some out of polymer clay instead lol.  DRINK ME posted:What kind of structural strength do the finished objects have? Like if I dropped the parrot on the ground am I looking at a fully deformed mess of fibre or maybe just a couple of small bends to put her back in shape? Depends how much you felt them as the more you stab the more firm they become, but generally the wool will hold its shape just fine and will just bounce harmlessly if dropped. Butt Detective fucked around with this message at 22:20 on Apr 12, 2021 |
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Apr 12, 2021 22:17
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DRINK ME posted:I am visiting from the knitting thread and have never seen needle felting before but I do have a handful of felted knitting projects in my one-day-I’ll-try-this list. I had no artistic skill at all when I started since I've never been interested in drawing or anything. You pick it up with practice and observation, I've been doing it over five years now. The parrot would be basically fine if dropped, although the wings might get bent badly (I used a thinner wire than I really should have for them) and would have to be bent back into shape. The little gryphon would be totally fine as it's thick and sturdy.
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Apr 13, 2021 01:25
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Just finished this little guy who I'm super proud of! Based on an orange-bellied parrot, which are extremely extremely endangered.
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Nov 6, 2021 13:01
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Adorable!
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Nov 6, 2021 22:54
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| # ? May 6, 2024 08:30 |
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Whoa this is cool as heck!
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Nov 6, 2021 23:11
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