Needle felting update

I took some pictures of my needle felting rectangle and square practice for our Roanoke Needlefelting Divas. Meant to be a show and tell of my felting practice.

Below are two photos of an orange felt square acquired from JoAnn fabrics. It is somewhat difficult to see in these pictures but I drew with a chalk pencil some squares and rectangles as shapes to work with.

The following photos show the roving being needlepunched via the Embellisher onto the felt square. The purpose was to practice felting into the drawn squares using roving or yarns. For the work shown below I used wool roving. At first I attempted to try to just felt within the drawn square, which truly requires more control than I have currently. Then found it was okay to lay out the roving across the drawn square and then take a bamboo skewer and turn the roving outside of the drawing back onto the square. I also trimmed around the drawn edges and then needle felted the edges.

Below is the first squares/rectangles practice. I was practing needle felting the edges on the top two. I learned that I need to felt one edge, cut off the yarn, turn the fabric and needle felt the next edge. The middle one looks more like an oval than a square, that's more because I did not do what I just mentioned above.

Here are the rest of the "boxes". I found that I prefer felting yarn than roving. I seem to be able to visualize how it should be placed better than roving. The multi colored rectangle was made from yarn I purchased at Walmart called Rag Doll. I love the look of the colors of this yarn and have another skein with warm yellows, oranges and some other colors added to the mix. The blue square was roving that I worked very hard to really fill in the square drawn. I then turned the felt over and needlepunched from wrong side and this pushed some of the orange felt square fibers to the front, thus the square now has some orange floating on the surface. I should have pressed the felt square after I completed the project for it to look flatter and smoother. I did not use any water soluable backing on the felt. Perhaps would have provided a more stable felt square to work with.

I really don't feel qualified to be teaching a group on this process. But we are all learning together. When I learned to sew, I had to practice sewing straight lines, then curves and such. I think learning this is like a baby learning to walk. Usually the first stage is crawling, then taking some baby steps. Some in our group are way past this point.

With more and more books becoming available on the subject, there is a lot more helpful material for learning more about the embellishing machines as well as the hand felting tools and needles.