Spring is in the air, so reach for the super-bright colours and be happy. Our local lovely Bead Crazy shop sells bags of fabulous brightly-coloured merino wool "tops", so I decided to get felting!
It is so therapeutic - you gently teaze out a wisp of coloured wool (or preferably two, in contrasting colours) and roll them into a fuzzy ball, just as if you were making a cotton-wool swab for removing make-up. Then you get your felting needle and STAB that fuzzy ball, all the way round, turning and rolling as you go and within less than 5 minutes you have a firm, solid, felted wool bead. It's magic my friends.
Flowers can be made by felting petal shapes and then needling them together, but equally good results can be had by cheating just a little bit and using a flower-cutter shape (intended for little cookies, or sugar-paste shapes) . Just stuff a wodge of wool into the shape and needle until it's firm. Your wispy ball of wool will reduce size by about a half once it is felted so that should give you some idea of how much wool to start with - if in doubt start with less than you think you need, as it's easy to needle more wool on to your shape, but more difficult to make a large shape smaller.
Have fun, and ponder on this - is a necklace made of wool actually a scarf? Or are those skinny bits of fancy yarn draped twice round the neck and left to dangle really a necklace? Ah, there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio.
Ooh, I love the beads and flowers - very pretty!
Posted by: Sarah | 07/05/2009 at 11:21 AM