Basic Needle-felting

So, needle felting is a craft that is curiously satisfying in a repetitively stabbing something way. It is like a cross between serial killing in miniature and playing solitaire on your phone. It is soothing, and when you are done you end up with something fuzzy and cute (mostly).

Daiso makes teeny $1.50 kits of wool roving for making teeny toy animals. They don’t come with a lot of instructions (or the stabby needle), just the wool, but once you get introduced to needle felting, you realize why: You pretty much can figure out what to do once you see someone do it.

A bunch of these kits of wool roving being re-sold through Amazon

However, I’m sending a bunch of these little kits with my extra needles to some relatives, and I’m guessing they have not seen needle felting and might need a how-to video or two, and some explanation, so here it is on this page:

Fortunately, they are out there:

Once you get past the basics of making little felted do-dads, you can explore a little further and take wool objects like a beret and needle felt designs to them:

Commercially made blank beret with needle felted swirls and small sewn dots added by me.

This gives you a notion of how to make and add felted bits to a beret:

Or you can end up at Lacis in Berkeley taking a class with Kim Van Antwerp on how to make a bendy flying goldfish bracelet: