Introduction to needle felting!

One of my many jobs on this blog is to introduce you to new things! Today, I will be introducing you to an extraordinary way of crafting, needle felting! Needle felting is a way of making many things like stuffed animals, ornaments, and even clothing! Needle felting requires very little experience, unlike other ways of making similar things like sewing. There are many needle felting kits that also can explain needle felting in great detail. All that you need for needle felting is a needle, wool, and core wool. I will link the materials that you need at the end of this post. First, let’s go through the basic steps of making a needle felted cat.

1. Take your core wool and poke it with your needle. Poking is key. The more you poke in a certain direction, the more the core wool will start to take shape. For this particular cat, you will need to shape it into a circle. It should be relatively hard and stiff by the time you have finished poking. It should look like the image below once it is done.

2. Cover your core wool-shape with normal wool, I chose grey. Start with a thin layer, and poke this layer of wool into your base shape of core wool. You need to keep poking and layering until the whole shape is covered in wool and cannot be pulled off. It should look like the images below.

3. Add fine details. Needle felting requires little wool so start small. For the eyes, poke in one spot until you get a small black dot. Now, add to this small black dot to make it a reasonable size. I also added little white reflections in the eyes by doing the same thing. In addition to eyes, add a mouth, and a pop of color with a pink nose.

4. Make the ears. With more core wool, make two small circles. Then, shape these circles into triangles. Next, cover in normal wool, the color of your cat’s body. I added little pink triangles inside of the ears. Finally, using the needles, poke the ears into the body, by going around the perimeter of the ears and poking them onto the desired spot on the body of your cat.