Needle Felting Day 2 - Adding Details to Flat Felt

Today you will finish and refine your felted flower and we'll add colored details to it. So first to refine your flower you do want to poke with your needle around the sides of each of the petals. You want to firm up and further condense the wool so that it becomes more of a solid form. There should be no wispy pieces that are sticking out. Everything should really feel like it is stuck down to your flat surface that you started with. In my case that would be the pink base. When ready to move on to details first just poke in some yellow for the center of your flower which I have already done. But then you're going to take some green and I would like you to make a stem and at least one or more leaves. To create a stem you're going to take a small amount of green wool twist it like a rope and then if you would like to thicken up your stem just fold it in half and then continue twisting it again. Once you have a piece that's about the size and width that you'd like just hold it down where you want to have your stem be and then you're going to start poking it in on the end of one side. So I started here where it's meeting the flower. Just poke it in a few times very firmly to make sure that that one side's attached then you can twist up your wool again hold it again where you want it to be placed and then start poking in the opposite side. Once you have connected the wool on both sides of the stem lift up your piece and just check the back of it and make sure that some of that color is actually going through because this proves that you have well connected that line of wool and then you can work on just gently poking through the stem from one side to the other and to just make sure the whole thing is getting connected. Next to make a leaf take another small amount of green wool. This can be a different shade if interested. You're going to want to fold up some of that wool into the size and shape that you want your leaf to be. So I kind of started with a small amount almost laying it flat like a piece of paper and then I just kind of folded it into the shape. Similar to how you connected your petals to your flower you're going to then start pressing your needle in on top of where that leaf is and just control the shape of the leaf with how you are pressing your needle in. So if you want to make your leaf become smaller then you're going to pull the wool in towards the center and then poke it some more. If you want it to be wider you're going to pull some of it out in a different direction and then poke it into place. Start thinking about needle felting as being more like a sculpture where your hands are controlling where the wool is placed and then the needle is securing the into that spot. Finally I would like you to try some detail work. I would like you to add some fine detail by either placing a vein through the leaf of your flower or by putting some detail into the petals of your flower. To place a vein through the leaf of my flower I took a very very thin piece of green wool and I used a darker shade of green. I twisted it like a rope and just like for my stem I poked it into place on one end then the other end and then I'm working my way down the center. Practicing fine details like this is important to help you to feel more confident and able to make facial features on creatures or to do any kind of design work which you will need to do for future projects. So experiment with different things depending on how much time you have in class adding details or adding even some wool into the background to just show that you are learning and growing with your skills. And finally at the end of class no matter where you are with your assignment you are going to place your needle into your work and put it into your bag. I'm not going to have you turn these in separately from your bag we're always going to keep our work in our labeled bag with our labeled needle.