Needle Felting Practice - Day 1!

Today in class you will begin your first needle felting practice assignment. To begin you will be issued your needle in a plastic bag and you need to write your name and block on your needle and on the bag. Every time you run needle felting you will need to needle felt on a foam mat. Please do not poke and pick at the foam unnecessarily. You will also get a piece of colored felt today which will be what you will build your practice project on which is going to be a flower. You will get some undyed wool to begin with and your task today is to create a five or more petaled flower using the white undyed wool. I want you to begin your flower with a central circle. Take a small amount of the wool and just form it into a small circular shape and hold it in the center of your squared flat felt between your fingers. Start poking at the wool watching carefully that you are not poking your fingers. Once the wool is attached to the flat felt you can remove your fingers and then you can just continue to stab the wool. Every so often lift up your flat felt and check that the wool is starting to connect to the flat sheet of felt. You should see some of the wool pieces actually going into and through that flat wool piece. It might even start to go into the foam mat and if that's the case don't press your needle down so deep. After building your center of the flower I want you to then begin building petals one at a time. Remember you need to build five or more petals in total. You will just do this one petal at a time just like you did in the center taking a small piece holding it between your fingers and then stabbing between your fingers and watching as you're working. Try to make all of your petals the same size. When you're finished and you're happy with how your flower looks take some time to refine your work. Look at both sides of the felt make sure that it is connected and you can even use your needle sideways into the petals to help push and kind of control the shape of the petal. But as you can see I'm pushing the needle in and returning it out of the wool in the same direction. This helps to not break your needle. If you have time today or in another class you can also add some details using different colors. So for example I can take some yellow and place it in the center to give my flower a yellow center. I'll just continue to poke it right on top of the core white wool that I used previously and it will attach onto that. It will take a lot more time and a lot more poking than it looks like in this video because I'm using time lapse right now. But when it is time to stop for the day regardless of how much you are enjoying this process you will have to put your needle and work in progress inside the bag labeled with your name and we'll be storing them in the classroom. Just make sure that you put the tip of your needle into your work in progress or into some wool so that that needle cannot poke through the bag. I hope you enjoy needle felting. Please make good choices and take care of both the needles and your fingers.