Spring is coming very soon and Easter will be here at the end of the month,
so today I thought I'd share another craft with you and show you how to make
a wet felted easter egg.
Now we have new, at Bella Luna Toys this spring,
this Felted Spring Eggs Kit that has everything you need to make beautiful
felted eggs for an Easter basket. I think these are beautiful as decorations
at any time of year.
You don't need a kit. This is nice because it comes with different colors
of wool roving and some little wool accents we're going to put on at the end, but
you can do this with any colored wool roving. But this kit makes it handy.
The directions for this kit would have you making the felted egg
completely with the wool but i'm going to teach you another trick that will
make your wool go further and give you a nice egg shape if you're not too opposed
to using a plastic egg in the middle.
This is a nice thing to do if your have these laying around from a previous
Easter, what to do with these plastic eggs. On the other hand, I hear you if you
don't want to use plastic you can just shape an egg shape completely from wool.
In this case I am going to felt around the wool.
The other advantage to doing it around a plastic egg form like this is that after
you've felted your egg
you can cut it open, leave a little hinge on one side, put a little chick or other
treasure inside.
So, let us get going.
Oh, what color shall I use? I chose a purple egg, let's do purple over the
egg. So I'm going to unwind this wool roving. What I have set up
here — I have two
basins here, as you see. The first is filled with very warm soapy water,
I've used liquid dish soap
This is all you need, warm water and this one is filled with cold water and
a little dish soap.
I usually I like Ivory dish soap
but in this case I have something else. I would warn you not to use Dawn.
I've heard that Dawn is not very good for wool felting I think it cuts the
oil of the wool too much, but this is all you need.
So I start by pulling pieces of the roving apart and fluffing, it teasing
it a little bit, to make it kind of nice and even. Then I'm going to wrap it around
the egg, first one way going horizontally and then you break it apart. If you've seen
my video on needle felting, remember to to break the wool apart you want to have
your hands kind of far apart and pull.
That's because of the staple, the length of the wool.
If your hands are too close together it's not going to break but when you put your
hands further apart
it slides easily. So I've got one layer going horizontally,
I'm going to put another layer going vertically and this helps the fibers of
the wool, which have scales, the felting process is going to help
those scales kind of interlock. And when you go one way and then the other
it helps the felting process go more quickly. I'm going to
put one more layer going around crosswise. You know, I'm
going to do one more.
So we have two layers going in each direction.
Your egg will be kind of bulky at this point but it's going to tighten up
as we felt. I've got it spread out evenly, kind of nicely egg shaped.
I'm going to cup my hands around it gently and dip it in the water until
it's all wet. At this point, early in the felting process, you want to handle
it very, very gently and carefully. If you're too rough with it in the
beginning
it's going to develop folds and cracks. Now I'm just putting a few drops of
my dishwashing liquid on it and I'm going to start by just patting, patting
really gently. This needs a little more water here.
The soap will kind of help your fingers glide. If you're not familiar
with the felting process or wet
felting, think about what happens to a sweater
if you accidentally put it in the washing machine or dryer.
It's that friction — when you're dealing with with real wool
it's the friction and changes of temperature that cause the felting to
occur. And that's what makes your sweater shrink much smaller than its
size is that combination of friction and if you go from hot to cold. Now because
we want to felt this wool, in the final process we're going to go back and forth
between hot water and cold water which is going to hasten the felting process.
So it's already getting a little bit tighter and more
egg-shaped. I'm just going to keep patting round and round. Now this is
a craft that you can do with children, I've done it with kindergarteners, I've
done it with 3 to 6 year-olds. Younger than 3 might have a problem with
it but 2 year-olds would have fun watching you or helping a little,
especially as it felts more. Then a younger child can help with it
because as you'll see the more it felts, the firmer it gets, the more
roughly you can handle it.
So as an adult you might want to start at the beginning, this beginning stage,
until it starts felting a little bit and then a younger child can start rubbing too.
So now it's getting to a point where I can give it a little more pressure and
then also you can kind of rub the surface in a circular motion.
And look for these cracks, you see these cracks? Try to smooth them out and
I really can't stress the importance at first of just being very gentle. If I
started squeezing this too hard now to get lots of folds and cracks
I can feel the the wool starting to cool down. I'm going to dip
it again in the hot water and I can start handling it a little more roughly now.
If you were to feel this, you can see it's kind of smooshy.
We're going to keep felting until this feels really tight and firm around the plastic
egg.
So I'm just going to continue this process for a minute for the sake of the
length of this video but I'll be back with you in a couple minutes. I'm going to
time it and tell you how much time I spent just doing this and be right back.
So here I am, I've been at this for about 4 or 5 minutes now, just gently rubbing and
patting and it's gotten firmer. Let me rinse the soap off, you'll see it's nice
and smooth now. There are no cracks. Another advantage, couple of advantages,
to using this plastic egg in the middle: it's a lot easier to get a
perfect egg shape. You could do it completely from wool but you'd
have to use alternating pressure to kind of shape and mold an egg shape which
would be a little more challenging for a beginning felter so this gives you a
perfect egg shape and it also allows your wool to go twice as long. This
kit normally makes, I believe — one, two, three, four —
six eggs.
You could actually make 12 by felting over the plastic egg, you'd have
enough wool.
So it's pretty firm now and I'm ready to add some accents. Now this kit comes with
these sweet little — it's called pencil roving — thin pieces of roving but you could also
just use little bits of other colors if you have full roving. Make your own and just
add little bits of contrasting color. With this kit
we've got these nice little pieces of of colored wool,
almost almost like yarn, a little looser. I'm just going to put them around like so.
Make whatever kind of design I want.
Maybe one more. What color am I missing? Maybe a little orange.
Ok, I've added my color accents. As in the beginning, I'm going to gently, gently,
gently, ever so gently, wet everything. Put a few more drops of dish soap and just
start very gently patting.
The fibers from these little colored pieces you've added are
just going to grab the scales of the felted egg and adhere. It doesn't take much
to get them to stick on.
And now as a final step, As I told you in the beginning, when we go from warm to
cold that kind of shocks the wool and that's going to aid the felting process,
make it go a little more quickly. I'm going back to the hot water,
into the cold water.
A few more drops of soap to help the felting and help the colored
pieces stick.
And that's pretty much it. For the sake of this video I'm going to
end this soon but you could rub this just a little bit longer to get it nice
and firmly felted. Then the final step would be to rinse all the soapy
water off.
You could do it in a basin or even under a sink. This piece, for some reason that
orange doesn't want to stick. Another technique at the end if there
are any loose pieces you could just take a felting needle, as I demonstrated
before, just a little felting needle and felt any loose spots after you've
rinsed it.
You can blot it with a towel. I failed to mention but you probably see
you want to have a lot of towels under your basins, especially when you're doing this with
children it can be really wet job.
Ideally I'd spend a little more time rubbing and felting this but you get the
idea, that's all there is to it.
It's a lot of fun and as I said in the beginning if you wanted to cut this egg
open you take a pair of sharp scissors and start at one end, vertically across
but don't cut all the way through,
maybe from here to about here so you have a hinge and then you can open the
egg this way and you could put a little treasure inside, a little Ostheimer
chick or make a little felted chick.
Speaking of felted chicks, we have another felting kit, wet felting kit, that
just came in for spring, our Felted Chicks Kit. Once you've mastered
this — this is a great project to learn the art of wet felting — once you become
comfortable with this
the felted chicks are pretty much the same, you use a rubber band to shape the
chick, sew on a little beak and feet. They're adorable.
Anyway, I hope that's helpful, hope you try it.
Share with me, let me know and send me pictures
if you decide to felt some eggs. Wishing you a happy, happy spring.
See you next week, bye-bye.