Felting Fun

A friend showed us how to use real sheep's wool for felting projects earlier this week. What a rewarding medium to work with!

We simply purchased some felting needles, which are basically long skewers with little barbs that snag the wool fibers, creating a snarl. Just like in real hair! Wool is so fine, however, you get felt instead of dreadlocks. We find that working with a single needle is much easier than working with the type of needle tool that spaces out five needles at a time and does a large area. The reason being that we are making very small creations so far.

You can use roving wool and also wool yarn that is loosely spun. I simply 'unspin the wool to make it a strip of roving wool. Its less expensive this way. Plus I found some varigated colors of yarn that allow us to get many colors in small amounts.

So far, Big Sister and I have created two pieces. Really sweet!

Its a flower? Spiral? Just really pretty?

Do Fairies hatch from spring colored eggs?

The flower together with a next of three Fairy eggs.

And then there is Little Brother's project for the day....

Crayon shavings. Rice Chex. Water and some sort of sieve system.

I am not sure what the experiment was all about, but he did discover that some pieces flowed through the homemade sieve and some collected on top. Little Brother was very satisfied with his work.