I Am In Love With Needle Felting

Now for a final update on last week's girlie sewing - the gift in total.

One pretty, frilly apron, as modeled by Cuddlepie.

One silver box with some needle felted biscuit treats and a set of eight fabric tea bags.

And all wrapped in a hand-dyed pink, purple and yellow playsilk to use as a tablecloth for her little tea party table.

I had such fun making the needle felted treats. I am pretty sure the boys need some!

This is how I made the gingerbread man.
This is a good Youtube video, Needle Felting Basics for Beginners.

I started out with this Ashford Needle Felting kit, but have since bought more wool to top it up.

Fill the gingerbread cutter with wool and start to felt it down. I filled it to the top and the wool felted down to about a third of that. Once it is firmly felted down, add another layer. Keep doing this until it is thick enough.
See how I am felting this straight onto the foam mat? No! Do not do this! The foam mat should be covered in a piece of flannel fabric, so your felted piece doesn't become part of the foam. I found this out the hard way!

See all the little bits of foam stuck in there? I had to trim them all out and then felt another layer on top. 

Once you are happy with the thickness of the gingerbread body, lift it from the foam and needle felt the edges and any stray pieces of wool. 

Then it is time to add the icing. Take some white wool and roll it between your palms until you have a long, relatively tight roll. Start to needle felt it down around the edges of the body.

I found that as I needle felted, I had to keep the tension on the roll of wool. And sometimes even twisted it to make it tighter and skinnier.

Once you have gone all the way round, take a few tiny pieces of white wool and roll into balls for the eyes and buttons. Take the smallest piece of wool you can and then halve it. You will not believe just how tiny a piece of wool you need to make the eyes and buttons. Also make a teeny tiny roll of white wool to make the smile. Needle felt these in position. As they are so tiny, you would need to hold them and needle felt very close to your fingers - dangerous! You can hold them in place with the rounded edge of a teaspoon.

When you are finished, neaten up all the edges by needle felting into the sides.

The other biscuits were done freeform. For the round ones just form a ball of wool and start felting it, adding more where needed. For the square ones, I start with a long rectangle of wool and fold it into thirds to make a square. Start needle felting until you are happy with the shapes. Add embellishments as desired - icing, sprinkles, some cherries, choc chips, anything you can imagine!

Needle felting is a forgiving medium - there are no rights or wrongs, just play around with the wool. It is not forgiving on fingers however, if you happen to miss! I drew blood a few times and broke one needle by hitting the cookie cutter. The needles are quite fragile and break really easily.

Needle felting is SO much fun! I am hoping to try out some 3D shapes soon.

Like these ones

Look how realistic this one is!

Linking today with Frontier Dreams for Keep Calm Crafting On.

Crafting On Tuesday

Linking today to Frontier Dreams for Keep Calm Craft On.

I finally made the rainbow silk angel mobile. I dyed the silk for this ages ago, washed and carded the wool, and then it sat...and sat...and sat!
But here it is!

 

I think the angels are too crowded together, but this is the ring I had available to use.
I followed the basic directions in The Children's Year, but I cannot remember where I saw one arranged like this, with the colours spiralling down.

I used the 11 x 11 silks from Thai Silks and dyed them using Wiltons cake icing pastes.
I used beading elastic because that is the clear thread that I had on hand, but I think fishing line would have been easier to work with - the beading elastic was well, too elastic! It was really difficult to tie into knots.

I rolled a small ball of carded wool, placed it in the centre of the silk, then tied beading elastic around to make a neck. Using a long doll needle, I then threaded the elastic through the top of the angel's head. OUCH!!!

Tie the beading elastic for each angel onto the ring, arranging the angels as desired. I think in the book, they are arranged in a line on a branch.

Tie four ribbons to make the hanger. Wrap the ring in another ribbon to cover all the knots from the hanger ribbons and the beading elastic.

Tie the four hanging ribbons together with a knot. I then used the leftover end to tie a bow.

The longest part in the whole thing was wrapping the ring in ribbon! Next time I might use a thin ribbon, embroidery floss or wool through the angels' heads - then the knots would look nicer and I wouldn't want to cover them up!

Just a little note for any Australian readers. I have mentioned my sheep before and how excited I am to finally be using my own wool for projects. I have heaps of white from our sheep and black from a friend's sheep. So if any sheepless Australian readers would like a little parcel of white and black sheeps wool sent their way, let me know at steinermum22@gmail.com - it will come totally natural, as it came off the sheep's back! So children can go through the whole process of washing, carding (you don't need carders, just hand tease the knots out), dyeing if you wish and using!
I have made this tree and this sun.
Just drop me a message if you would like some - just be aware it will be NATURAL, ie. smelling of sheep and with bits of grass and hay in it!

Our Substitute For Air Drying Clay

A while ago, I was given a photocopy of this great 'recipe' for air drying dough. It is easy to make and works out much cheaper than air drying clay (which is hard to get and expensive where we live).

You will need:

Half a cup of cornstarch / cornflour
One cup baking soda
Half a cup of cold water

Put the ingredients in a saucepan and stir over medium heat for a few minutes until the mixture thickens to look like moist mashed potatoes. Then place the mixture on a plate and cover with a damp cloth until cool. Knead it like dough. It is then ready to use.
I have found that it must all be used in one go - it goes hard within a day and is unusable.

The recipe that I was given had an example of using it to make fossils, so that is the first thing we did. We shaped the dough into balls which the boys then flattened out with the palm of their hand. Then they pressed shapes into it - shells, rocks, leaves, a toy lizard. I do not have a photo of these as they were taken out into the sandpit and garden and buried to find later as 'fossils' and who knows where they are now!

But we also used this dough to make these diya lamps.

The boys just made the basic shape, but Miss Butterfly made more elaborate shapes. She had also made a flower shaped one that was beautiful, but she dropped it while painting it.

This is a really versatile recipe and because the clay is white, painting shows up clearly and you don't need tons of paint to make the colour show up.

Crafting On

Time for Tuesday craft over at Frontier Dreams. I have been working on a few bits and pieces; dyeing lots of silk for my new little enterprise and some more yarn.

But I finished this Father Sun yesterday and I really like how he turned out.

I am calling him Father Sun as that is what I set out to make. But he could also be a happy smiling flower - put some brown in the middle and he is a sunflower, give him white petals and he is a daisy.
He is based on a Father Sun puppet by Suzanne Down of Juniper Tree Puppets (Living Crafts magazine Spring 2009 issue). If you haven't already, you should sign up for her free story newsletter. It is such a fantastic resource for stories and puppet ideas. I love it.

I altered it a bit as I wasn't making a puppet, just a sun to display above our nature table.
I am pretty excited that the wool is from our own sheep.

First, just make a needle felted circle, whatever size you like.

Then roll small balls of wool and pull them into roughly triangular shape, however many rays you would like. After finishing him, I realise I used an even number of rays so I wish I had added a seventh to make him a little less symmetrical.

Needle felt the rays. I then wet felted it as the rays didn't seem too strong, but see how he feels.

Once he is dry, take some small amounts of wool and roll a thin sausage for the mouth and some little balls for eyes and cheeks and needle felt them on very loosely.

And there he is! The more I look at him, the more I think he looks like a flower. But the boys think he is a great sun - nothing like the adoration of your children! They are still at the age where they think I can do anything!

Making A Sunflower Gnome

We in the Southern Hemisphere are, of course, still in summer, so I thought I would make a little sunflower gnome to grace the nature table.

Some of the photos are a bit off as it is quite late at night here and the flash makes everything look a bit wrong!

She started out as this little peg body.

I don't have any photos of the next few steps as I had already half made her before I decided to blog about her!

The next steps are like the directions in this tutorial on flower fairies from Wee Folk Art. I changed the shape of her petals to make them longer, more pointed and not quite so 'puffy'.

The hat is made like the gnome hats in the book Feltcraft by Petra Berger.


Her hair is just some brown wool roving, glued in place, then twisted to make the pigtails.

To draw her little face, I just used Legoman's markers and Ferby pencils for the cheeks, using these basic directions.

Don't you love the dinosaur egg he keeps his pencils in? He had one of those build your own dinosaur kits and it came in this egg. Even though it is plastic, it looks kinda natural and he just loves having his pencils in a dinosaur egg. He thought he was very clever to repurpose the egg as he really wanted to keep it.


To make her sunflower, I used the directions here. The Living Crafts blog is an absolute treasure trove of gorgeous crafts to make. I subscribe to the magazine and I love it!

The leaves and stem are made in two different shades of green. I used the darker one to cover the stem and for the main leaves. I then cut some smaller 'leaves' to place in the middle of the dark green leaves.



The stem is a pipe cleaner, doubled over to the length I desired. I cut a thin strip of dark green felt, covered one side in PVA craft glue and wrapped it tightly around the pipe cleaner.

The light green leaf was glued onto the larger leaf. Then the leaves and sunflower were just glued onto the stem. I will see if this will hold up or whether it would be best to put a few stitches through the leaves and sunflower into the felt on the stem to keep them in place.

Put the two together and you have a sunflower gnome!

Apologies for the rather bedraggled looking gum blossoms in the background! We went to the park today and there is a huge pink flowering gum (my favourite gum tree) overhanging the playground. My rule at the park is that you may collect anything that has fallen naturally and it was quite windy last night. So we had quite a collection of gum nuts, blossoms and leaves to bring home.

And I just love them as they remind me of my very favourite book growing up, Snugglepot and Cuddlepie. One of the characters was called Little Ragged Blossom and she wore a gum blossom skirt.

Isn't she too cute? And I even found a pattern for knitted gumnut baby finger puppets.