Get Started Needle Felting By Liat Gat

Needle felting is a great way to experiment with felt and add a unique touch to your finished knitted and crocheted projects. All you need to have to get started is some kind of foam block so that you don't hurt your hands and some roving which is wool that has not been spun into yarn. It's just plain and actually you can use yarn. If you want to you can use little pieces of yarn or to cover more area you'll want to buy some roving from your local yarn store.


Take your knitted object and lay a piece of the roving on top of your knitting and underneath place the foam block. You will also need a special needle called a felting needle which has tiny barbs on one end and a little bent end to hold onto. Be careful, the barbs are really, really sharp. When you use the needle to poke through the roving into your knitted piece, basically the barbs make the wool felt.

The barbs draw the wool in and compact them holding them together just like felting when you accidentally shrink a sweater in the washing machine only this time you're doing it without water or soap. For this reason needle felting is also called dry felting.

Take your needle felting needle and jab it repeatedly up and down through the roving and your knitted item down into the foam below. Now please, please watch your fingers because even though it doesn't look very sharp if you poke yourself it is going to hurt really bad so which I am sure you will probably do one time and one time only.

You'll need to tack down the layer of roving first of all until it's securely in place. Then to make smaller details you can twist the piece of yarn, roll it up if you want and lay it over the top of your knitting and just poke the needle down in and out of the knitting until it stays securely. Give your needle felted design a tug to make sure that it's securely fastened to your knitting. You'll also want to go over the whole area to make sure that it's fastened down.

Some ideas of things that you could needle felt are: it's always fun to needle felt little snowflakes. You can just take a piece of white yarn, and cut it into six little pieces and then needle felt a little start laying one piece of yarn over and then another crossing it and then another at an angle and then make tiny arrows for the tips of the snowflake. Just make sure that especially around the edges you poke the needle felting needle in many times so that it's really secure.

People like to needle-felt sheep as well. Those can be a fun addition to say some slippers or slipper socks that you've made. There's really no limit to the designs that you can make. Just make sure that you use 100 percent wool because anything else will not felt. Acrylic fibers don't have the same capacity for felting.

You can also do needle felting onto other felting. For instance if you've made a felted bag, a felted purse, felted slippers, you can take a small piece of the yarn or a contrasting yarn or some roving and do a little swirly design. You can do a flower. You can do a snowflake - whatever you want. You can even put someone's name. Let's say you want to make them a pair of slippers for the house. You can needle felt their name using a piece of wool yarn. It's really up to your imagination, so have fun!

Liat M. Gat is an expert video knitting instructor and author of the website http://knitfreedom.com. She writes and films video e-books on the most popular topics in intermediate knitting today. Become a Knitting Superstar by watching over 100 top-rated knitting videos at http://knitfreedom.com.

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