Needle Felting 101
Sunday, February 1, 2009
I don’t normally do a lot of needle-felting in my work, but for the project pictured above, I used it to embellish the surface of a nuno felt.
Boy, does it take some time to do! I think the needle-felting alone took about 6 hours.
Here is a very handy website called WizPick and their primer on getting started:
Getting Started
To start needle felting you will need a handful or more of clean, carded wool and some felting needles.
Holding the hook end of a needle between thumb and forefinger, jab the working zone into the fiber mass so that all motion is parallel to the length of the needle. Placing the middle finger farther forward just above the working blade will stabilize the needle and give you more control in your work. Sideways pressure or prizing is the principle reason needles break. The two main needling techniques are:
- Stabbing – in which the working zone of the needle is fully withdrawn each time the needle is jabbed into the fiber mass.
- Jiggling – where the working zone is jabbed into the fiber mass and jiggled up and down several times before being withdrawn.
Jiggling is a more efficient use of energy and tends to felt faster, but it also creates more pronounced holes. Vigorous stabbing works fibers over a greater depth and gentle stabbing tends to make smaller puncture marks resulting in a smoother surface. Felting needles on which the barbs are situated close to the tip are considered surface felters and produce a smoother, more closed surface or skin.
We encourage you to experiment to see which needles work best for you in different situations. While different needles have been designed for particular uses and situations, there is also a degree of personal preference involved when selecting the best needle for what you want to do. For instance, some people prefer working with longer needles when firming or hardening the felt, while other people prefer the shorter ones. Wizpick felting needles have been carefully chosen to provide for every handcraft situation and still each be sufficiently different.
