Needle felted giraffe tips

Ok so I learned a lot from this experiment. I was very intimidated by having to add all the spots. three lessons I learned.

First if you are going to apply spots directly to the giraffe then you need to be sure it is very firm before you start if it is still mushy the spots go in and the space between them will be too wide when finished. one option is to create a sheet of spots using the brush and multi-needle punch tool to make the spots flat and even.

 

 

The other thing I tried was to make the spots angular like in real life I feted a sheet of brown with the multi tool and brush pad. then I cut with scissors (heaven forbid) the sheet into the angular shapes and felted them one I really like the control this method gave me.

 

I also had to pull off the horns cut them smaller and place them closer to the eyes as they were too far back. That cutting worked well also.

 

 

Fixing mistakes in a needle felted piece

I read a lot of posts and most of them said do not cut your felted sculptures that you should always pull it apart so that isn't always  possible and you know what I don't think its even necessary I've cut my things apart many times and I've been able to cover it up and make it look just fine so I don't know what they are saying when they say don't cut it I've been just fine by cutting my things especially when I make something too skinny I cut it up the middle shove a ball inside and then seal it back-up seems to work just fine for me.

sculptural effects with polyfil felting

I really like needle felting with polyester stuffing i call it polyfil. it is a pain that it only comes in white but I have been able to get faster and better sculptural effects. it is probably hard to see but i even had some feather effects on the owl chest and of course his face. i suspect i am either using the wrong wool or i am just not poking it long enough. 

I should have a better idea if it is me or the wool once i try my kool aid dyed wool. this is the first sculpture with a glass pebble eyes it was kind of opalescent i painted the back black and yellow its kind of a neat effect but will take a lot more practice to get right any small imperfection is multiplied by the magnification of the water drop shape. This is for my mom. I made my mother in law a dolphin. I am going to bring my felting stuff to try and get my mother or sister interested in felting with me my mom likes sculpture with clay and my sister is a crochet fanatic so they are good candidates.

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Armatures what I learned

I like to use armature for the big stuff. I Learned a lot from sarafina fiber arts you tube videos. i like the way she anchors the legs. I have applied that technique to some of the other stuff I have felted. I want my felted animals to be to scale at this point i may want to do some caricatures of animals in the future but for now I would like to keep them accurate. So i have been measuring pictures in books or on my kindle in cm then translating them into inches this is the measurements I am going to use for the giraffe .

Even though koi whch is all polyfil except the black spots does not have an armature I still measured  a koi picture the the picture was 5 inches but the final koi is 10 inches I marked where each fin started and ended to get it to look real.  

This is the wrapped armature for a big cat i am working on.

I hope to post the giraffe when it is done.

coloring polyfil for felting

ok so i read on the Internet that polyester is very hard to dye and regular dyes and kool aid does not work but that fabric crayons were the right kind of dye and work on polyester fabrics. I had some fabric pastels i think they are softer than fabric crayons. they way fabric crayons work is that you draw a design on a piece of paper and iron it on to the fabric. with the pastels you probably draw on the fabric then iron to make it permanent . I tried drawing on paper and ironing it on it did not work  probably because of being pastels it just absorbed into the paper I tried drawing on wax paper instead thinking it would not soak in but it did not work well either. so I tried rubbing it directly on the polyfil it seemed to work but was really messy and I thought it might stain my hands so I used a knife to put shavings in the poly fill and then apply the iron with wax paper in between, ti worked but i had to keep puling and mixing in white with the orange a few pieces got really dark and stiff so I don't thing this was the best idea. just rubbing it around on the heated poly fill mixing it by pulling and re-ironing seemed to do ok. you can see the results below. I was surprised that even though my fingers turned orange it washed off with water it seems the heat is the key to setting it. Of course the soapy water turned colors so it made me wonder if that would be a way to get the dye to spread more evenly.

If i do mix it with soap and water I will probably microwave the polyfil to set it as I am not sure how to iron it if it was wet. more experiments to come.

better Pictures of felted scultures

 

I have been trying to take pictures of my felting to share it never looks as good in the photos as is does in real life. the photo above is the first I took in my kitchen the photo below is one I took with a neutral grey fabric backdrop.  it did help some I think. A lot of folks take pictures of their stuff outside  I will try that a next but I think my phone camera is just not that great I will try my real camera as well. I think if I look at more felting examples on pinterest I can get some more ideas to try.

 
 

koolaid wool dying

Now that my wool came I tried dying it. The wool came as a plain off white color to start. I used the instructions from this website http://dyeyouryarn.com/kool-aid.html. we used 1 pack cherry and 1pack tropical punch 16oz of water to 2 oz of wool.
this is how it cam out.

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I think it came out well I am looking to make a cardinal or red dragon from this.

The other batch did not go as well since we started with purple kool aid and added some green from fizzy bath color tabs. it seem really grey and I wanted brown so we added a pack of orange kool aid after we did not mix it well so some inner parts di not get the orange . it is a cool effect and looks fairly natural but I don't think I will make the mistake of adding a color after the wool is already sitting in another color.

  it is kind of tye dyed. eventually I am going to try to color small amounts of polyfil with fabric crayons and an iron.