To be exact, at first arrived needle-felting and then, the idea to superpose embroidery on. I discovered then, that needle felting embroidery was an art by itself and gathering a large community of felters and embroiderers. In definitive, I unconsciously joined a new world (for me) dedicated to these fiber arts and I would like to share mine with you today!
My wish to explore needle felting is pretty recent. At the beginning of the last school year, I had the desire to create my own felted ornaments for the Holidays and create animal miniatures. Luckily and unexpectedly, I fell on the perfect project at Michaels store with a cute little llama kit to give a try to needle felting.
In a couple of hours I got the cutest (3 dimensional) llama ever and I have to confess that I found the technique very simple and satisfying. Right away, I was totally conquered by needle felting and got the basic supplies to make more. It's very easy and cheap to get ready for needle felting. Just get a pack of various needle sizes, a wool roving pack coming in various colors, a piece of foam to constitute the mat and go ahead, let your imagination begin!
I kept making my own 3 dimensional shapes, animals, plants, Christmas balls and 3 months later of self-teaching I felt confident and experienced enough to launch my first needle felting workshops for the holidays, for grown ups and kids alike!
These classes were a blast, I was so happy to see people amazed by their creations, as I have been when I created my first ones! These classes encouraged me to keep exploring wool roving potentialities. Also, I don't know if you remember the post I did in September about wool roving but I posted a needle felting patch tutorial to customize clothes. Needle felting is great to create 3 dimensional shapes but it's even easier to work in 2 dimensions, on a flat surface to texturize any piece of fabric. You can find the tutorial here.
As you may notice if you follow me here and there, embroidery took more and more room in my creative life. Naturally, needle felting brought me to add more texture to my botanical embroidered designs. I got the idea to include wool roving on my block-printed designs I'm used to embroider: prickly pear cactus, pilea, monstera leaf, fiddle leaf tree...etc.
The principle is simple: create and fill the large surfaces with wool roving, playing more or less with the thickness. Then, it consists in stitching the fine details and enhance the felting with embroideries. Most of the time, I love to underline the design and embroider the stems, cactus spikes, veins or any fine details like the embellishment on the pots.
Now, I create more plants and and try new designs, pushing myself to think out of the box.
I'm sure the upcoming workshops at Anthropologie and West Elm will inspire you!
I love to mix and match classic embroideries and needle-felting embroideries.
If you want to give a try too, don't wait to register at the Needle felting class at:
Hope to see you there!