In the past couple of months we’ve made felted food, felted fairies, felted butterflies and leaves and trees. I like felting because you can finish a project really quickly. In under 30 minutes you can create something beautiful, even as a beginner. You’re basically just poking fibre over and over and over – this is not a skill that takes years to master. While practice does help, compared to crafts like knitting or sewing there isn’t much of a learning curve and you can dive right in.

Recently, I’ve been all about the felted flowers. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with them yet, but they’re pretty. I was thinking that I could hot glue them to a barrette or sew them to a sweater or scarf. Right now, though, the use is less important than the making.

Because I want to share the felting love, I made a little how-to video. In it, I make a felted flower. It’s fun! It’s not that long! I say um a lot! Check me out:

(If you are reading this in an email or a reader you may need to visit the original post to see the video.)

After the video I trimmed the leaves and centre of the flower slightly with a pair of scissors. I also added a bit more pink fibre to the petals. But that’s it. Easy-peasy, I promise. The whole thing took me about 7 minutes from start-to-finish, and it would have taken less time if I hadn’t been so busy saying ‘um’ over and over and over.

If you’re really interested in felting but would like some hands-on instruction, many local yarn stores and arts centres offer classes. They’re usually single workshops, because felting just does not require ongoing instruction so much. If you’re looking for classes here in the Vancouver area my good friend teaches classes at Baaad Anna’s and Black Sheep Yarns. I can vouch for her, because she taught me.

Happy felting!

Although, when you see the first felting tool I purchased you can understand why I felt it was definitely not suitable for preschoolers.

Close-up of the scary Waldorf-inspired needle felting tool I originally bought

My good friend and inspiration in all things fibre-related, Kirsten, assured me that needle felting could be done by 4-year-olds. And then we set up a needle felting session with a few of our mutual friends at my house. Kirsten brought her fabulous hand-dyed supplies along, so we had a wonderful woolly rainbow of materials to choose from. My friends all bought felting tools at the local yarn store, along with handy felting mats, and I discovered that theirs were both less scary and much easier to use than my tool. But even with my tool needle felting was much simpler than I expected – it only took me a few minutes to complete my first project, a felted egg.

Commercial, not-so-scary needle felting tool with handy locking guard

My felted egg

My 4-year-old Hannah saw us all sitting there, working on our creations, and she decided she had to try it. She dove right in and made herself a butterfly. My friend helped her tie little knots in the antennae, but the rest of it was all her.

Hannah doing some needle felting

Close-up of the felting tool and mat in action

Hannah’s butterfly

As for me, I had my sights set on a pumpkin for our nature shelf. I was quite pleased with how it turned out, if I do say so myself.

My wee pumpkin

Then Hannah and I collaborated to create a fall fairy, also for our nature shelf.

Our fall fairy, from the front and back

If you want to try needle felting yourself, there are some online tutorials showing just how easy needle felting really is. I would opt for the fancy felting tools you can find at most yarn stores, especially if you’re working with children. Because I definitely seemed to stab myself rather a lot before I also ran to the store for the mass-produced version. But beyond that, dive in and give it a try, and I bet you’ll be surprised at how quickly you can create something really cool.

Edited to say: I have now posted my own needle felting tutorial, if you want to see how quick and easy needle felting really is. Or, if you want to hear me say ‘um’ a lot. Either way, it’s sure to be a winner!

But, you see, there’s something you should know about me. I can be a tad, err, obsessive. When something almost works, but not quite, I will beat that dead horse into the ground. This is how I ended up sewing baby carrier after baby carrier until I had achieved Perfection. It’s how I program computers a lot of the time. I know I’m close, and I become relentless and single-minded until I get there.

I do, at least, usually have the good sense to not try the same thing over and over, expecting a different result. I change my approach constantly, tweaking and modifying. I ask people questions and then ignore their answers as I come up with yet another thing to try myself. And, oh yeah, I use a lot of ‘salty’ language. This is why Jon tries to avoid helping me tackle technical problems at all costs. I am maybe not the best or most patient client for him.

Lovely, lovely wool

Anyways, after my last post about the felted eggs I received a fair bit of encouragement. And then my dear friend Kirsten of Yummy yarn let slip that she had a bag of colourful wool bits that might be perfect for my project. (Her roving is to die for!) And I decided to get back on that horse, because I am nothing if not dedicated to driving myself slowly insane.

The hole that wouldn’t go away

This time I went and bought some plastic Easter eggs first. I tried using more or less the same method I used before – I wrapped bits of wool around the egg, dipped them in hot soapy water, and then massaged them with my fingertips. But it didn’t go that well. I kept getting holes that wouldn’t fill in, and the plastic halves of the egg kept popping apart. Very frustrating.

Two eggs packed inside a nylon

So I changed my approach (after using a few bad words and crying a little). As tightly as I could, I wrapped about 6 layers of wool around a plastic egg, and then stuck the whole thing inside an old nylon. I tied the end off so that it was held together pretty tightly, and then added another egg. You could probably fit six or more eggs inside a single leg, leaving yourself extra at the end to hold on to.

Into the hot, soapy water

I dunked the eggs in wet soapy water and swished them around, holding onto the extra nylon at the end so that I didn’t have to stick my hands into all that heat. Then I removed the eggs, allowed the excess water to drip off, and slowly and gently squeezed each one. Gentleness is key, or else you end up popping the plastic egg apart and the finished product isn’t quite the right shape. I also found it pretty effective to pour boiling water from the kettle over the eggs.

My finished eggs

After a couple of dozen repetitions, the wool felted nicely. Little fuzzy strands poked through the nylon, and the consistency changed. I could feel that they were holding their shape, the eggs were smaller and firmer. Then I threw the nylon and eggs into a hot dryer for about 20 minutes. After I cut the nylons off (carefully), I had some pretty decent felted eggs.

I will be honest and say that I’m not sure this is actually a great craft for kids. My 4-year-old could help me get the eggs ready to go into the nylon, but that’s about it. The hot water is just too hot, the felting requires too much care, and cutting the eggs out of the nylon without hurting them takes fine motor skills your average preschooler simply doesn’t have. But Hannah likes the finished product, so it all worked out.

Also, I got another tip from my yarny friend Kirsten. If you don’t have plastic eggs, or prefer not to use plastic, it’s pretty easy to make a wool core. Form a rough egg shape using some tightly packed wool, and wrap it with feltable yarn. You don’t need to wrap it completely, just enough to hold its shape. You will end up with a product made entirely of natural materials, and you can save yourself the time of starting from scratch.

In spite of my crafty turn I have been a colossal failure when it comes to kids’ crafts. I was a Brownie leader for 5 years, and in my unit the weekly craft nearly always involved drawing a picture about the topic at hand. Draw a picture about snowshoeing! Camp! Healthy food choices! I just wasn’t that good at coming up with relevant activities involving glitter glue and pipe cleaners. And now that I have my own kids things haven’t changed much – Hannah does a lot of colouring, and that’s about it.

I have tried. A couple of years ago I had my good friend and her daughter over near Christmas to make handprint ornaments. I made red and green playdough and it seemed fine. We rolled it out and wrestled two toddlers into making a ten or so handprints each. (This is not as easy as it sounds, by the way). We punched holes to string ribbon through, and etched words while the dough was still pliable. Then we baked it, and it became apparent that I used the wrong recipe.

You see, cream of tartar, which is featured in many playdough recipes, is actually a leavening agent. So our lovely ornaments ballooned and bubbled and turned colour and were a total disaster. My home-made playdough would have been great to play with, but was not suited to creating permanent objects. For that I would have needed a different recipe.

But hope springs eternal. I’ve been reading my latest issue of Mothering magazine, and there was a great article about creative moms. It was very inspirational, and I decided I needed to get back on this horse. I needed to craft with Hannah, not just for Hannah. I decided to try felted Easter eggs.

To start, we dyed some wool using Kool-Aid and food colouring. That part actually went pretty well.

Then I read some instructions on-line that suggested using a plastic egg in the core. I didn’t have any on hand, so I thought instead I could follow these instructions and just felt a little at a time in layers. And I started. But the felting was very slow-going. Hannah helped a bit, but it really needed hot water and a lot of patience so I mostly did it.

After half an hour I had made little progress. Jacob was cranky being on my back as I stood still for so long, and Hannah was asking me constantly where the eggs were at. I decided to change tactics. At this point I could have gone and gotten some plastic eggs and followed these instructions, but I didn’t. Instead, I remembered something about felting in the washing machine. I threw big wads of wool into some of my old socks, but I neglected the crucial step of tying off the ends. The result was the wool escaped and made lovely felted strands, but no eggs. In the end I got two lint-covered ball-like objects.

The rest were total discards.

Luckily Hannah likes her ‘eggs’, although she was hoping for something that would crack open to reveal a chick inside. (I love that she thinks I’m up to that sort of task). As for me, I think I’m going to try again next year. But I will follow the instructions to the letter, and skip straight to the washing machine. Because I clearly need to take baby steps to successfully craft with my babies.

What about you? Do you have any crafting fiascoes you can share? It would make me feel much better.