Hello I hope everyone is well and safe today I'm really excited because I'm
going to be sharing with you five must know needle felting tips and tricks to
make your needle felting much more enjoyable and creative so if this sounds
fun please like comment and subscribe to our Channel and stay tuned
I did 2 of these videos before and they'll be carded up here and linked in the
description box below first tip I'm going to be sharing with you is actually
a technique and it's to make this kind of curly texture and it's really useful
for dogs especially this kind of a poodle so it's really nice and of course
it's really nice as a texture if you made enough of this it could be lovely wall
hanging but again it works really well for kind of dogs and different creatures
so to do this you're going to want to take your wall I'm using grey wool but
of course you could do any color you want and you're going to want your
needle and I already started this but I'm going to finish this little square off
you're going to want to take a nice long piece kind of pull it out and you can
make it really long and thin or you can make it kind of fast I'm going to Felt this
I'm gonna put it and I'm going to felt just a little bit down just so it kind
of attaches to my base felt and you don't have to do this too much and then
we're going to start twisting so just twist in all one direction try and
incorporate all of the wool and you're going to want to kind of let it twist
onto itself and you can continue felting and again you can get many different
textures and colors with this depending on the fiber technique is actually a
blending technique and I used this to make this color for this dog as I didn't
have any wool in that color and this kind of orangey brown for this red panda
and this dark brown for this little dog and to do that I personally use dog
brushes and you can get bigger versions that are especially for wool blending
but they cost a lot of money and for me I'm not making these big sculptures so
dog brushes work really well and you get them quite cheap from wherever so what
you do is you're going to want to get your different walls I just took these
random colors and you're gonna want to lay them together and first you can
start by pulling them apart and putting them
together it kind of just helps break them up a little and then work in small
bits if possible so this is bit big for blending I think so I'm going to divide
it into two I'm going to lay it down on one brush and then I'm just going to
start kind of combing it I'm going to start combing this side first and then
kind of take more and more and it was going to kind of want to do this and
then you can take it off put it upside down and just kind of continue there we
go and it also has the benefit that your wool will be combed in one direction so
now you can use this for whatever project you want to do and it's
actually a storage one for your needles and my tip is to store them in a sponge
with the different sizes clearly marked as there is a difference between these
type of needles even though like let's be honest they're the exact same thing
but they're not believe it or not and I like to store them like this so I can
see this obviously which needles are which and the needles I get they are by
Rayher and they just have coarse, medium or thin and that's really handy for me but
I know that's a lot of brands do them by numbers and by the way the bigger the
number the thinner they are and the smaller the number the bigger so they are
so use your thick or your course needles first and use that when you're starting
off in the middle of the project and then you work out to the smaller needle
when you are doing really the details as these felt faster and these felt bit
slower. Next technique I actually used to make this dog and it's one to get a really
really nice soft layers on animals and I use merino for this but roving also
works as well and I made this just as a test just to see how soft and fluffy it can
get and I'm kind of in love with this I feel like I've been put two eyes there's
and it's maybe cutest thing in the world but the way
you do this is with layers so you're gonna want to start with your felt and a
piece I just did a 2d one just would be a bit easier but obviously 3D works
really well as well you're going to want to take your wool and then you're gonna
want to take a piece that is or the width of your piece if you know again it can be
3d or 2d and you're going to want to separate it out a bit just to make sure
it is and then you're go on to just get an even layer and I'm doing this quite
thick and I'm doing many layers just so it's really fluffy like this but I only
did I think two layers for this dog so you're gonna want to start at the
very bottom of your piece and then gonna want to work up in layers and you're
just going to felt that again then I'm just going to repeat that process until
I get my finished piece like this and again it depends on how many layers you
want to do and how fluffy you want your piece to be. Next technique is kind of
similar to the last one with the layers for animals this one is actually using
yarn and again it depends on the type of creature making or what texture you want
this is kind of a gray lion that kind of looks like a sheep I don't know it was
just an experiment for this video and the way you do this is kind of the
same as the last one you start at the bottom and work your way up and I also
made this as an example with three different types of yarn and I'm actually
kind of in love with us I really like how it works out so for this you're
going to want to take many different lengths of yarn and the way I do is is I
wrap them around my finger multiple times and then I cut it and then I
get my many different lengths of yarn so they're all the same size and they
will be felting really easily and it's just so much easier than cutting each
one so what you're gonna want to do I started obviously but you're just going
to make sure you get your little bit of yarn in as far as possible just so it's
really really fluffy and if don't want to do that you just kind of
push it out of this and you're going to want to just felt it and then you're
going to add to that and you have this and this is really a nice technique for
kind of more coarse hair dogs and any other kind of creature like that you can
make a line like this and it's a bit more crafty and maybe not as natural but
it's still a very very nice technique and again it uses up your old yarn and
most yarn does work with needle felting by the way and you can even use it in
the middle if you've like really kind of old ugly yarn and you'd want to use it just make
sure it isn't too hard for your needle and you can even use I've used gold
thread in the past to kind of add a little bit of nice detail to different
animals and stuff so I definitely recommend it. This technique is actually all
about armatures and armatures are little bits of wire in my case
pipe cleaners that you push into a needle felt sculpture to give it a bit of
shape number one and so you can also move this so as you can see with this
dog you can kind of move it's paws and then it stays in place
lots of people use wire but I prefer pipe cleaners because the little bit of
fluff kind of holds to the wool and makes it in my opinion easier to felt and
the wire doesn't show through as much obviously try get pipe cleaners in the
colors as close to the color you're going to be making your
final creature in. So to make an armature what I do is I fold it in half and then
I'm going to measure the width of the body and this is just it's going to look
really weird it's basically the skeleton of the body so it's going to be really
really skinny and I'm just going to twist it here and I'm gonna fold it
there to get my legs and I'm gonna measure the length of my
legs and I'm just going to twist them in make sure at the end you have no wire if
at all possible that's why I'm doing all this folding it just makes this safer
number one and you'd have it's easier to kind of cover
and I'm going to cut this one in half just so I can get the front legs make
sure you use good scissors so I'm just going to fold it in half and kind of
twist it around here
and do the same folding again and twisting there you have your armature
this is just again a really basic armature but it kind of does help with
just the structure and how the creature looks. Thanks so much for watching
I hope you learned something today, please tell me down below if you have
any more needle felting tips or anything you do in your own special way and
please again check out the last videos as there are so many more tips there thanks for
watching please like comment and subscribe to my Channel and see you
later