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). Though some people will recommend smaller needles for miniature projects, like #42, I use '#38 medium star' for everything, including miniature felt sculptures. 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 switch to one needle. The longer you work on a sculpture, the harder it gets, so at some point felting with three or even two needles becomes difficult. But starting out with a single needle is a waste of time I think, unless you're making a miniature toy or some small detail, like a limb.
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 to create the base shape. These synthetic materials are cheaper, but are almost as easily matted by needle felting as wool. And they look very much like wool too:
polyester fiber; for the base shape, use any cheap wool or synthetic material that can be needle felted
5. The base polyester shape should not be felted too hard, otherwise it will be difficult to control the shape of your animal at later stages. After you add layers of wool, the felted material will become 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. 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 to keep the shape that you give it by hand-sculpting. You shape it like clay then, and it works much faster than needle felting. 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 soft instead of hard with over-felting. That happens when you ruin the fibers so much that 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, you should be safe: the wool will only get harder. The problem is that when you push the needle too deep, it pulls fibers out of the opposite side, you push them back in, they come out again and so on 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 has gotten 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 wool and needle felted
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 felted animals 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 to avoid ruining your shape when brushing it.
There are special needles for creating fluffy surfaces, but I haven't used those yet. The needles have reverse barbs that pull fibers out of the shape instead of felting them in.
11. To make the surface of your sculpture smooth, don't tamper with wool 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.
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, since even hard felted legs may bend under the weight in 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 is concerned, 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 can't recommend particular suppliers of wool, but there are some on eBay, for example.
undyed carded wool
14. If needed, wool or finished sculptures can be dyed with acrylic or other textile dyes.
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.
Process
16. Much of the felting process is tedious - for example, before you start sculpting, the base shape has to be completed. This preliminary work, as well as many other stages in the felting process require very little concentration, so audiobooks can prove very 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)