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Let's talk 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  or these:  If you want to get fancy, you can felt around pipecleaners (or other wire) and make things like these:    (chocobo and salad fingers made by forums user RandomFerret) If you want to get very fancy you can make things with almost lifelike detail:   or if you have a lot of spare cash you can buy those two here and here. 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. I personally have basically 0 artistic skill and that first dragon up there was about the fourth thing I ever made. 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). 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. Organza Quiz fucked around with this message at 04:40 on Aug 7, 2016 |
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Aug 6, 2016 05:12
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RandomFerret posted:This lets me do really thin and strong extremities that wouldn't be possible with wool alone, and the finished piece ends up being posable: I've been doing some stuff with pipecleaner skeletons but the feet cause me a lot of trouble. It always seems like I have to make toes thicker than the pipecleaner in order to cover up the pipecleaner properly and securely, and the wire likes to stick out the end unless I either curl up the end of it underneath (which makes the toe even thicker) or make the pipecleaner part of the toe quite short and then extend outwards with pure felt, which is really finicky and doesn't always work very well either. How'd you get the ends of the chocobo's toes to work?
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Aug 17, 2016 05:05
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Bananachin posted:I've lately been more into stampmaking but when I do felt, I mostly make pokemon. The scolipede was my first project and it took something like a month, which in retrospect is a depressingly decent turnaround for my projects Those are really cute! I've made a few pokemon too, I think it might be inevitable. I kind of wish I had a favourite pokemon so I could make it for myself but I'm too indecisive, I'd want to make half of them. One of the first things I tried to do was make an umbreon for a friend but I had absolutely 0 idea what I was doing and screwed it up pretty badly, so I revisited it once I had a little more practice and ended up with this:   This was back when I was using synthetic stuffing as a core, which was actually not a terrible idea for making a whole bunch of stuff really cheaply. It doesn't hold a candle to actual wool if you want to make anything quality but all I had at the time was small amounts of coloured wool from the starter kit I bought and I didn't want to shell out for lots more wool before I knew I was going to stick with it as a hobby. It makes things very, very stiff and you can't really do it around pipecleaner.
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Aug 20, 2016 05:36
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Tears In A Vial posted:This looks super cute, and I'm well up for trying it, I often need a break between big cross-stitching projects. Can anyone link me to a decent starter kit on Amazon UK or something? That second one is almost the exact one I got! I just got a slightly cheaper version with less needles and (I think) less colours. It's served me very well, the handle is comfy to use and I've only broken one of the needles so far. The instruction booklet wasn't terribly useful since it wants you to guess exactly how much felt you need to make a given shape right from the start and doesn't tell you that you can build up a shape in layers until it's the size and shape you want it, but otherwise it's been a really good kit.
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Aug 21, 2016 06:28
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Hoplosternum posted:How do you do the colours? You buy wool in the colour that you need! Or dye it yourself if you're feeling very crafty and adventurous. It is supposedly possible to mix two colours together to make new colours but it is pretty time consuming to mix them to the point that they look like a new colour rather than just two colours mixed together. Not that you can't get some pretty cool effects with two colours mixed together, I play with that a lot these days. Basically your best bet is to just buy the colours you need though. I'm lucky enough there's an artist in my city who does wet felting and sells her excess fibre so I have somewhere I can go to see it in person and buy the exact amounts I want. Otherwise you're stuck ordering online in whatever colours and quantities you can find.
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Aug 22, 2016 14:44
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Hoplosternum posted:Holy crap, how do you do such perfect detail!? Like the whites in umbreon's eyes. Wow. A very, very small bit of wool and a very sharp needle. Tiny details are actually really easy to do, if a bit fiddly and time consuming. For example, the umbreon's eyes are just red layered onto the black of the head, then black pupils layered on the red, then a tiny bit of white layered on the black IIRC. You can get much more detailed than the stuff I make, like the near totally realistic sculptures I linked in the OP.
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Aug 22, 2016 16:53
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HelloIAmYourHeart posted:I used to do wet felting, needle felting, and spinning, but I have since moved on to other hobbies (quilting!) and I have an absolute TON of wool that I will not use. Would anybody be interested in buying some for CHEAP CHEAP CHEAP? Like shipping and a few dollars cheap. You can cram a ton of this stuff in a pretty small package. I'd be interested except I'm in Australia so chances are just the shipping would be more expensive than it would be for me to just go buy the stuff here  Seabhac posted:Colour me intrigued. Can you get into the actual process a bit? I knit and I've seen people felt knitting projects by wetting them but this seems to be a completely different idea? Yep, this is completely different. The process (such as it is) goes something like this, assuming you aren't using a wire skeleton: 1. Decide what you want to make 2. Break that thing down (in your head) into bodyparts/smaller shapes. For example, a cat is made up of a head, a body, four legs, two ears, one tail etc 3. Pick a bodypart, grab some wool, squish/roll/press it into approximately the shape you want and start stabbing until it's compressed and solidified 4. Add more bits of wool as necessary to parts that look like they need to be bigger or a different shape. Like you could stick some wool onto the head to be a nose, for example, or if the body looks too small you can wrap more wool around and stab it on until it's big enough. 5. Make the rest of the bodyparts. Try to leave some unfelted wool free at the end that will join up to the rest of the thing eventually 6. Join the parts together by putting them together and stabbing at the join until it's joined. You can also add some more wool to cover the join to make it more stable. 7. You made a thing! If you want to save coloured wool, you can do most of that with cheaper undyed wool and then just put the coloured wool on over the top. I'm still learning the balance between layering on too much colour such that the parts get too big/bulky and not layering on enough so the white shows through. I think it's just experience. Making something involving a skeleton is simpler in a way, just more fiddly because you have to make everything already joined together instead of separate bodyparts: 1. Decide what you want to make 2. Bend pipecleaners into a skeleton of what you want to make. It's up to you whether a particular part needs skeleton or not (like say for our cat example you might want the tail to have pipecleaner so it can be moved but you don't care about moving the ears so you don't bother). Chances are you're giving the thing a skeleton in the first place because you want it to have spindly legs that can hold it up properly, but everything else is going to be personal preference 3. Wrap wool around the pipecleaner and start stabbing, keep wrapping bits of wool around and keep stabbing until you've turned your skeleton into an actual thing. Try not to stab directly into the wire because it will blunt/break your needles 4. Swear loudly because you were being so careful not to stab the wire that you forgot to not stab yourself 5. You made a (possibly slightly bloody) thing! There's a lot of video tutorials on youtube for various felting kits that you can check out too that will give you a sense of how it all works.
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Sep 1, 2016 11:22
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Seabhac posted:Haha so it really is just stabbing! I was imagining some sort of specialised technique Nope, the thread title is 100% literally accurate. I mean, there is a level of technique in knowing how much to stab it and which needles to stab it with, but in essence that's all you do.
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Sep 1, 2016 13:33
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HelloIAmYourHeart posted:Organaz Quiz, if I sent you a ton of stuff for shipping do you want any? Also do you like sparkles and bright non earth tones? Thanks for the offer but I'm good, thanks. I am curious about sparkle wool, though. Is it just like roving with glitter embedded in it or is it more like strands? Does it work okay for needle felting? The artist I buy my wool from over here does wet felting and she uses strands of shiny silk in her work sometimes. She was skeptical that I could make it work with needle felting but I grabbed some for like a dollar anyway since it looks fun to experiment with. Suspect Bucket posted:We have khatadin sheep at the farm I work at, and I've heard the only thing their wool is good for is felting. Is that true? I'd love to try and make some mini sheep :p I don't really know about specific breeds of sheep vs felting but as far as I'm aware it's a general property of sheep wool that it's good for felting (also some textures of cat hair which is how you get books on how to make fingerpuppets out of your cat. I have to admit I am kind of tempted to try and make my cat out of my cat sometime). You could try wet felting some of it to see if it felts together? That's probably easier than buying a felting needle just to see. Organza Quiz fucked around with this message at 07:23 on Sep 2, 2016 |
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Sep 2, 2016 07:21
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HelloIAmYourHeart posted:if you want me to throw some in a regular envelope and send it your way. Okay that does sound pretty cool, I'd love to try some out and I think a regular envelope shouldn't be too exorbitant.
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Sep 3, 2016 05:11
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Bananachin posted:A Weekend Wool Worm. Super cute! And yeah, I know how it is with putting the finishing touches on things. I have a couple of projects I'm mostly through but for some reason am putting off finishing. The current thing I'm making is a commission for a friend and it feels really weird just plain working on it until it's finished instead of switching between things and putting off doing certain bits of it. HelloIAmYourHeart posted:Also if you make anything cool with this stuff you have to post it here for me to see. I got your envelope today! Thanks, there's more in there in more colours than I expected  It's gonna be a little while until I have a chance to play with it since I want to get this commission finished first but I'm really looking forward to seeing how it works and I've already got some ideas in mind.
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Sep 19, 2016 12:49
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Mostly finished my latest critter! lovely pictures because it's late and there is no light:  Still want to poke it a bit but I'm pretty pleased in general with how it came out. Next stop: experimenting with these shiny threads I now have lying around asking to be experimented with.
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Oct 30, 2016 15:33
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Needle felting pro tip: watch Westworld while you make things for maximum creeping yourself out
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Nov 19, 2016 10:32
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HelloIAmYourHeart posted:Also if you make anything cool with this stuff you have to post it here for me to see. I thought I'd start small and gave this dragon some sparkly wings that are very hard to photograph but are pretty cool and sparkly IRL:    Not quite done with the dragon as a whole but I like how the wings came out
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Dec 10, 2016 16:45
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Lava Lamp Goddess posted:Anybody know how some needle felters get really smooth finishes on their pieces, without little hairs sticking out and making it look all fuzzy? I've tried trimming the little hairs off, but they just show up again once you handle the piece. I think that usually involves wetting the piece so that it felts together as tight as possible, but I've never tried it myself.
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Dec 13, 2016 07:45
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I can't really judge, I'm currently in the process of stabbing together my own perfect woman:
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Apr 21, 2017 05:34
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A) that is absolutely adorable B) how the hell did you not manage to stab yourself, tell me your secret. I just bought a kit with leather finger protectors and all they mean is me finding new creative spots to stab myself.
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May 4, 2017 16:12
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I guess my problem is that I don't like felting into a foam block unless it's the earliest stages of something. Otherwise I end up holding it up and felting into thin air because a) it's small and fiddly so I want to hold it up to my face where I can see properly, b) the shapes mean I often can't physically lie the part I'm felting flat on the foam and c) if I stab into the block then it starts to pull the felt out of my project and into the block which makes the opposite side look really ragged. I bought a kit with some leather finger protectors which have helped to a certain extent but are a bit bulky so I don't use them all the time. Probably I just need to be more careful that I am stabbing air and not finger. Anyway, I finished Garnet!  
Organza Quiz fucked around with this message at 03:47 on Jun 5, 2017 |
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Jun 5, 2017 03:22
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You beat me to it!
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Jun 9, 2017 04:47
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RandomFerret posted:Well hey, that's pretty much on-brand for the character, isn't it? Thanks! I spent a lot of time staring at fanart trying to work out what the right colours actually are since since she's in shadow the whole time on the show. Speaking of colours, I got a small hand carder a month or so ago and it's been fantastic for mixing colours. I was doing it purely by hand and it was taking forever, making my fingers hurt and getting the wool all tangled up. The carder is faster, mixes more evenly and makes it all light and fluffy and nice to use! For reference, for Padparadscha up there the only colour that I actually had as a colour by itself is the orange I'm using for her face. The rest of the colours are all mixed from other colours. It's really cut down on having to buy even more roving to get the perfect one. Organza Quiz fucked around with this message at 02:00 on Jun 11, 2017 |
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Jun 10, 2017 05:39
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Last project of the year! 
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Jan 2, 2018 12:22
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I was idly looking for tutorials on Youtube and came across this guy's stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8VyGb_jUNA Some more from his blog:     Just unbelievably stunning work. I've started on a willie wagtail taking inspiration from that sparrow, hopefully I can make it half as pretty.
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Jan 26, 2018 05:14
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