How to make needle felt

There are so many ways to use handmade needle felt these days! Hats, pruses, roses and other utilitarian items can be made with felt! Even today many cultures used felt to keep their houses warm and protect themselves from the elements. Try these basic steps and you too can make felt by the using the needle felting method remember this, that it is not hard to make felt it just takes some energy to meld the fibers together.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Barbed felting needles
• Wool fiber
• Upolstery foam square
• Felting tool

1. 
   Felting Tool

   This is a needle felting tool with barbed needles that are attached to the tool. This tool comes in a variety of sizes but I recommend if you are doing a large piece it is best to but a large needle felting tool so that you can cover a wider area of fiber.

2. 
   Fiber on foam piece

   Take a section of wool fiber and separate the fibers and place all of the fibers on a piece of foam in one direction making sure all of the pieces are parallel with each other.

3. 
   Felting fiber

   Begin felting the fiber by taking the needle felting tool and stabbing the fiber into the foam in a repetitive motion until you get something that looks just like the photo. As you a punching down with the tool fold in the wisps of fiber into itself and felt it with the tool so that you have a firmer piece.

4. 
   Lay fiber over

   After you have completed that, place some more fiber in the opposite direction of the felted fiber that you just made. Making sure that the fiber that you just laid down is spread out over the original piece evenly and then begin to felt the piece with the felting tool.

5. 
   Pull off the fiber

   After the wool is completely felted with the felting tool it is time to take the piece off the foam and begin to full the fiber under some warm soapy water to firm up (this is the process called fulling) the fiber to make felt.

6. 
   Finished Felt

   The fiber has now been finished by having it go threw a process of warm and cold water soapy baths to form this bat of felt. Notice that all the fiber threads are melted together to form a transparent piece of felt. The wonderful flexibility with this method is, that you can make the felt as thick as you want it by adding more layers of wool and needle felting it into the bat. The possibilities are really endless.

Tips & Warnings

• Try other fibers with the wool just make sure that you use fibers that are going to meld into the wool like Alpaca or Llama wool.
• Be careful to keep all needle felting tool away from children because they can cause someone to get severely hurt.