Someone stop me before I try and embellish the wool before it's even off the sheep!

First things first. THANK YOU for all of your prayer for Carol and Randy. We love them both and we're glad Randy's surgery went well. A little love, light and positivity goes a long way.

Now onto your regularly scheduled programming...

I have to admit. I haven't been feeling too creative lately. The weather has been cruddy, I've been fighting an almost cold, MOm has the week off and I've been working my butt off. So when I get home, I march into my bedroom and do a runnign bellyflop onto the bed and do. not. get. up. I do all of my best work on my bed.

Wait a second. That came out WAY wrong. Let me rephrase.

I sit on my bed quite a lot. My bed is like most people's living room sofas. I have a TV in my room and it's in front of my bed, so why leave? I got my wool, I got my crosstitch, I got my embroidery...it's all good. That's that, and it is awesome.

So I keep trying to upload a video demo but that nonsense isn't working. lol. That's probably for the better...it had to have been the single most LAME video set up ever. I'm serious. It was on my bed (where I do all of my needle felting and crosstitch etc), on a plasic drawer, on my laptop, with my phone setting on all of the that, recording. Guh-het-toe.

Back to needle felting. It is so much fun...and I think I have a new fiber to be addicted to! Hooray texture! Here's a little trip into the basics of needle felting...and no, we do not have the tools or roving at the shop, but we DO have the hand dyed wool fabric.

The tools. From the top, the bristled square thing is a needle felting "mat." It is what catches your needle as you do the felting, and helps insure that the needle doesn't snap. The white thing is a needle holder. It's foam core...like the posterboard. Fancy stuff, very technical. At the bottom we have our needle felting needle. It is extremely sharp and brittle.

Here is a close up of the needle. Granted, the pitcure quality isn't stellar, but you can kind of see the little burrs in the tip of the needle. This is what grips the roving and pulls it through the fabric. But do you see how thin the tip of that is? Yeah, that can snap if you don't felt properly. It's very thin, so it can get through the fabric, but that also makes it brittle.

Mmm, mmm, mmm. THAT is the wool roving. I have it plastic bags because I'm just plain persnickety and I didn't want the wool sticking to each other. The colors...oh this picture doesn't do them justice.

Here's a close up of that wool roving. Yum! This I bought from a gal named Heidi... Heidi's GORGEOUS wool roving... very nice lady and she's got some wonderful stuff. This magenta with the purple? Forget about it! Lovely.

It just peels right apart and you grab as much as you need for what you're doing. A little, believe it or not, goes a loooong way.

That lump in the covers? Darwin thinks he's helping by "staying out of the way." Where was he? In my way, but being adorable cuddled by that ball of blue roving.

So how do you do it? Grab your wool fabric (cotton does NOT work with this, the weave is too tight for the roving to go through), place it on your felting mat and fanagle it into the shape you want and set it on the wool fabric. In a straight up and down motion, push your felting needle thorough the roving and the fabric until your roving sticks to the fabric.

Really, you can work this into any shape you want. That thin little line is a small piece of roving that I rolled into a line and punched in to the fabric to make it thinner.

This is the reverse side of the design. See how the roving gets pulled to the back? That's all because of the barbs on the needle. It ensure that it stays put, punchthe roving back through the front. That stuff is now "fused' to the fabric.

If you don't have roving, but you have the felting needles, you can felt 2 pieces of wool together. Punch the needle through the 2 layes, and ther eyou have it. That piece right there? Not going anywhere.And look at the nifty texture? How cute would that be to add to an accent pillow, a wall hanging, or an art quilt?

Or you can make little designs...great for applique, or if you have wool sweater or purse, you can embellish them with whatever you want!

So I'm pretty excited. It's pretty therapeutic, actually, and it's an instant result. You get to see your work pay off immediately, and who doesn't like that?