Needle felted hexagons

Needle felting: another one of those crafts on my “must try sometime” list. I have also considered wet felting, but that seems like a lot more effort and potentially quite messy with water and soap everywhere; at least with needle felting I can stop and leave it at any point if I get tired (which is a definite consideration these days).

I have a couple of needle felting kits that I haven’t done anything with yet — I tend to avoid projects that require me to think in three dimensions — and the two dimensional felting projects I’d come across mostly seemed to involve a big commitment both in time and investment in different colours of wool roving. But it was still sitting there in my brain as something I wanted to have a go at.

Then inspiration struck. I saw someone using a duck-shaped cookie cutter to create a felted piece to add to a baby blanket. Now, I only have standard round cookie cutters and I’m not sure where they are at the moment (they were last used with some alcohol inks) and a browse on Amazon left me uninspired. But my other half has a 3D printer and is always asking if there’s anything he can make for me, so I found a hexagon design on Thingiverse and he printed it for me.

And it was ideal. Small enough that I could play and neat enough that the end result could be used as part of another project. Also small enough that I could easily use up some of the small scrappy bits in the bag of waste felting fibres I’d picked up on Amazon. I ended up making four hexagons and choosing the three that worked best together for this piece.

Rather than simply mount the three hexagons together, I wanted to add a bit more decoration. There were some curves in the felting so I exaggerated that and went with a spiral motif. I created the first one from a piece of jewellery wire and used that as the pattern for the others: one from some silky jewellery cord that I couched in position and one from a string of small seed beads. I did try stitching the beads in place but that really didn’t work so I glued them instead.

The background is a piece of craft felt that I stuck to the back panel of the frame with double-sided tape. I then used more tape to stick the hexagons in place.

It’s quite satisfying to end up with a finished, framed piece when I only started out having a play. And, while I’m not rushing to do more needle felting, I can see myself doing it again and creating something as part of a larger mixed media piece.

If cross stitch is “proof that I have the patience to stab something 1000 times,” then needle felting takes that to another level. (And I didn’t stab myself once!)