Tips for Making Needle Felted Animals
This is not a complete tutorial, just a small collection of my preferred techniques for making needle felted animals.
Needles
1. My favorite brand of felting needles are '#38 medium star'. These are all-purpose needles with extra notches that make them felt faster (more fibers matted per stroke). Although felting needles come in a wide array of shapes and gauges, I use '#38 medium star' for all sorts of work, including felt miniatures. You can buy these needles on eBay, just query for 'star felting needles', without quotes.
2. There are 'needle holders' that combine several needles for faster felting. These can be especially useful at earlier felting stages to create the base shape. I make my own holders by tying several needles together with a string or a thread.
a three needles 'holder'. my brother Grisha who also makes felted toys taught me this trick.
I usually start with a bunch of three needles, then switch to two, and only then to one. The longer you work on a sculpture, the harder it gets, so at some point felting with three or even two needles becomes difficult.
Of course, miniature toys and parts like limbs may be easier to do with a single needle right from the start.
3. To avoid breaking your needle while felting, don't jitter it from side to side, but push in a straight line (not necessarily perpendicular to the shape surface, but with no lateral motion). Needles break when you drive them in and then move sideways, even slightly.
Wool
4. To save wool, I use polyester batting or polydown for the base shape. These synthetic materials are cheaper, but are almost as easily needle felted as wool.
polyester fiber; for the base shape, use any cheap wool or synthetic material that can be felted
5. The base polyester shape should not be felted too hard as it has to stay flexible. After you add layers of wool, the felted material becomes even harder - the more needle strokes, the harder it gets. It's possible to make wool almost rock hard by felting, and then of course you have very little control over it. Overfelting should be avoided, but as an emergency escape route you can sculpt by cutting pieces off your shape that got too hard and then cover it with a thin layer of fresh wool to smooth out the surface.
base shape covered with wool
6. At a certain stage in the felting process you can start shaping with your hands instead of a needle. This is when you have needle felted your toy hard enough so it keeps the shape that you give it by hand-sculpting. You shape it much like clay then, and it works faster than needle felting, of course. Then, after you have hand-sculpted your animal as needed, you can reinforce it by additional needle felting.
7. Smaller shapes, like limbs, may become softer instead of harder with over-felting. That happens when you ruin the fibers and they no longer hold together. Then it's almost impossible to reinforce the shape without adding much more wool to it, which of course will make it oversized. To avoid this, don't push the needle all the way through your shape. As long as the needle does not come out the other side while you felt, the wool will usually only get harder. But when you push the needle all the way through, it pulls fibers out of the opposite side, you felt them back in, they come out again and so forth until the fibers break and can no longer be matted. You could use a wire frame or even glue as a last resort, but it's not always practicable.
8. When needed, you can cut pieces off your toy or decrease its size by brushing with a dog brush and then pulling out or cutting off extra piled wool. These are extreme shaping techniques, but they are useful if your sculpture got out of control or got too hard with over-felting.
'extreme shaping technique' example: a section of the neck was cut out, then the two sides were sewn together with a thread; after that, the seam will be covered with fresh wool
9. Your finished animal can be as soft or as hard as you like, but soft sculptures have to be handled carefully as they don't keep their shape well. Make your toys harder if you want them to preserve every minute detail in shape and expression.
10. A dog brush with metal bristles can be used to make felted animals fluffy. You can even use a needle as a brush on a miniature level, to work on spots you couldn't otherwise get to. You need to felt the surface hard enough first to avoid ruining your shape when brushing it.
There are special needles for creating fluffy surfaces, but I haven't used those yet. These needles have reverse barbs that pull fibers out of the shape instead of felting them in which means they can't be used for toys with synthetic base shape inside.
11. To make the surface smooth, don't tamper with wool too much before you felt it on. Take a piece of wool, without twisting or crumpling it, put it on your shape and felt it in. Wool can be matted even without a needle, just by rubbing, so to keep its fiber structure intact, it should be handled carefully.
For a super smooth surface, use wet felting technique. Dip your finished piece in soapy water and rub its surface thoroughly. It will mat any stray hairs left after needle felting.
12. Limbs can be created separately and then needle felted to the body at any moment. Just leave (or add) some unfelted wool at the end of the limb to attach it to the body with.
It may be recommended to use wire frame in legs for heavier animals as even hard felted limbs may bend under weight over time.
13. I use undyed carded wools or batts (sheets of wool) that are available in a wide range of natural colors. Felting wool can also come in the form of sliver, roving, or top. As far as needle felting goes, these types of wool are not as good as batting as they have a more regular fiber structure (especially tops) that may be difficult to hide. I don't know particular suppliers of wool outside Russia, but some can be found on eBay and elsewhere on the net.
undyed carded wool
14. If needed, wool or finished sculptures can be dyed with acrylic or other textile dyes.
If you soak your toy in a weak dye solution (as opposed to applying dyes by dabbing), pay attention to its orientation while it's drying. The color will be most intense on the down side. So for instance if you turn a felted quadruped upside down to dry, its back and the top of its head will be affected by the dye the most. Even if you just wash your animal after an unlucky dying attempt, the down side may get slightly colored as any dye leftovers will accumulate on its surface.
Pictures
15. Sketching and making clay sculptures helps figure out particular details in animal anatomy. You can experiment at the felting stage, but felting is much more time-consuming, so it may be a good idea to start with a sketch sometimes.
Process
16. Much of the felting process is tedious; before you even start sculpting, the base shape has to be completed. This preliminary work, as well as some other stages in the felting process require very little concentration, so audiobooks can prove useful.
17. Be careful: it's easy to hurt your hands with needles, especially when felting miniatures or miniature details.
Victor Dubrovsky (vriad_lee@chushka .com)