Sculptural Needle Felting Kits: Materials, tools, and color to get you started

My online video-based masterclass is up and running, and getting good feedback from students. I refer to it as a ‘masterclass’ because it covers a LOT, including the materials and tools I prefer, and why. But it’s a remote learn-from-home class, so unlike my in-person workshops, I’m advising on tools and materials, not offering them. Until now.

In addition to making my recommendations and providing some sources, I’ve also taken some time to bulk order things and repackage them into manageable amounts for students. So you can order felting kits directly from my store that will get you started. Here’s what’s included:

• 1 pound (16 oz) of natural white Corriedale wool. I use this for nearly everything. When people ask me ‘What core wool do you use?,’ this is it. It has a long natural length of the fiber (or ‘staple) and its’ a little wavy, and more coarse than the more familiar Merino wool, which makes it great for building up mass.

• 1.5 oz of dyed Corriedale wool in 15 different colors. These small samples will be enough to add color over top of your creations, and if you need more you can get more through my source, GreatLakesFibers.

• 5 medium (38 gauge) felting needles, which I use for nearly everything. I’ve marked their tops in red paint so you can tell them apart from the

• 5 fine (40 gauge) felting needles, useful for tiny details, and marked on top with white paint.

• and an 8 x 10 x 2 inch foam rubber work surface, which gives enough space (and two sides) to work on while protecting yourself and your table top.

Contained in the kit: white roving, colorful roving, needles, and an foam pad.

The only thing missing as far as I’m concerned is a multi-needle tool— the handle that you can put felting needles into in order to use more than one— or just to make it easier on your hand. Pinching a single needle between your fingers and flexing your wrist to poke into wool a few thousand times is not great for your body. Using a needle holder— even just to hold one needle— changes the shape of your grip (the bigger the tool, the better for your grip) and tends to transfer some of the motion to your elbow and shoulder rather than just your wrist. You can watch a FREE section of my workshop all about tool use and choices on my YouTube Channel, here.

Happy Felting!

Assembling felting kits in my studio. Kits fit perfectly in US Post Office shipping boxes, a welcome bonus!

Why Do My Felting Needles Keep Breaking?

I’m back with another tool use tutorial. If you’ve been needle felting for any length of time you’ve likely broken a needle. Or two. Or a lot more. As strong as these steel tools are, they’re also surprisingly brittle at their tips. Whether that sharp little tip goes flying off into the carpet or embeds itself deep inside your project, a broken needle is frustrating. And there’s no repairing it, it’s a question of replacement. So how can you minimize the destruction of your tools and keep yourself and your surroundings safe from razor-sharp needle tips? First it’s worth taking a closer look at exactly why your felting needle is breaking in the first place.

Keep in mind that the felting needle was designed for a very specific function: to move precisely straight down with its tip sleeving into an awaiting hole several inches away, tangling any fibers in its path. That is to say, in an industrial setting the wool and other fibers fed into a felting machine are supported over a perforated base so the hundreds of felting needles mounted above can travel straight down through the fiber as the machine repeatedly lowers and raises them. Here’s a concept drawing of an industrial machine:

I often describe the industrial felting machine as a mouth full of teeth chewing—except the glaring problem with that metaphor is that most of the time teeth are grinding and moving sideways—there’s a lot of motion in the jaw. Not true with a felting machine: felting needles are purpose-built to move ONLY up and down. They’re quite strong in that plane of motion—but any sideways pressure to the tip will snap it easily.

The short answer to why your felting needle keeps breaking is that you’re using it wrong. You are not using it like you’re a precise machine. You’re either applying sideways pressure to the tip, or you’re running it into something hard. 

So first of all, don’t beat yourself up about it. You’re NOT a machine! We’re adapting part of an industrial machine to hand use, and the element of chance that happens with hand work of any kind is going to always be a factor with this tool. 

But even given your basic humanity (yay- machine-made things can be so boring)- there are some ways to avoid breakage, and it mostly comes down to attention. Not to say that you’re inattentive when you’re needle felting—you have to be, to avoid stabbing yourself and to get the wool to move how you want it to.  But you have to train yourself to be aware in a few particular ways.

First of all, you need the needle to enter your mass of wool perpendicular to its surface (see the illustration below). That usually means manipulating and turning over the mass of felt you’re working on in concert with the motion and directionality of your tool-holding hand. This is increasingly important as your wool becomes increasingly densely felted as you proceed, because dense felt is firm enough to snap off a needle tip when the needle is plunged in or pulled out at an angle. I often see students trying to shape their felt by somehow turning a corner with the needle, which just plain doesn’t work. 

You need to develop muscle memory of doing it the right way—straight in and out, pushing in and pulling out far enough that the needle comes all the way out before you push it in again instead of dragging it sideways. This takes attention and practice, but you’ll eventually not need to think about it as much. 

Along the same vein, if you are using more than one needle in a multi-needle holder, you need to be sure that ALL of the needles are entering the fiber perpendicular to the surface you want to affect. Think about it: if your multi-needle holder allows you to position your needles ½ an inch apart, but you’re working on a sphere the size of a tennis ball, it’s possible that one of the two needles is not going in perpendicular. Here’s an illustration of what I mean and why that breaks your needle:

So that means that you should be thoughtful about what I refer to as the ‘footprint’ of your multi-needle tool—the spacing of the needles where they come out of the tool. You need that footprint to work with the size of the object you’re working on. The smaller the sculpture, the smaller the overall footprint of needles:

Spread your needles out too far from each other when you’re working on something small, and the odds are that at least of your needles will not be going in straight, or will miss the piece entirely and hit something else. Like the tabletop.

Speaking of the tabletop, it’s probably made of a hard material. Breakage also occurs when the needle encounters something hard; with nowhere to go and continued momentum and force, the needle will bend and then snap. This hard, resisting object could be your tabletop, or a wire armature inside your sculpture. With armature wire it can be particularly difficult to avoid felting too close; the wire is, after all, inside the felt. Whether you’re entirely building up wool around said wire or cutting into a nearly finished limb to add in a wire and close the felt back up again, you’re going to probably hit that wire at some point. Again, attention is key- but so is some finesse. 

When you’re felting into something with a known hard element inside, use a single needle so you only have to keep track of one, and use a much lighter, looser grip on the needle holder, so when you DO inevitably get too close to the wire you’ll feel it and remove pressure without that fatal breakage. I do this a lot and, like all of this, it takes practice. I’ve definitely felt the needle flex but then withdrawn it before it breaks. It takes concentration to use delicacy.

Using attention, a single needle and a light touch will help you be aware of where the invisible wire is within your piece, and you can use that mental map to try to felt across or next to the wire from all sides, rather than straight into it. This will require turning over and manipulating your piece so you can work above and below and next to the wire, like this:

I personally favor inserting armature wires AFTER much of the felting has been done; I use a sharp blade to cut a channel into the nearly-finished felt and then only need to patch and felt across that section. Wrapping fiber around wire from the start and then felting all around it just gives you more opportunities to hit the wire and break a needle. I go deeply into this with visuals in my video based master class Sculptural Needle Felting: The Comprehensive Guide (self-promotion alert! But hey, I am VERY proud of it and I’m getting great reviews from students).

My final bit of advice for avoiding breakage: manage your needles well when you’re not actively using them. Don’t let your needle holder go rolling across your desk and onto the floor- I know I’ve broken a few needles that way. Have a system in place to keep your needles and holders, even if that’s just a piece of foam to jam them into. 

Now go forth and be aware of your wickedly sharp but delicate tools. Needle felting is an excellent means to practice self-awareness and creativity at the same time.

If you have any other great advice for NOT breaking your needles, please comment!

Needle Felting: The ONE Thing Nobody Teaches about needle placement

I know, a headline like that sounds like clickbait. But I’ll tell you what it is straight up that no one seems to teach when it comes to needle felting: that the placement and quantity of felting needles in your multi-needle holder makes a HUGE difference to your needle felting.

You may not have come across this yet if you primarily use a single needle. Once you do move into multi-needle tools, you’ll find that many needles too close together don’t penetrate the wool to actually felt. Instead, it’s best to let them act like single needles by spacing them out enough for what you’re working on. There’s more to it than that, and I’ll go into it in depth (and with illustrations) below to explain what I mean. 

First, I’m sharing this because lately I’ve been paying a lot of attention to the information floating around the internet regarding needle felting. With my masterclass video workshop now live, I’m researching all the places to market it to reach my core audience. My students generally range from total beginners to advanced needle felters, but what they have in common is a mix of hope and frustration: seeing the potential of the art form but not knowing how to get the results they want.

If you’re reading this I’m going to assume you understand the basics of how needle felting works. (If not, read this previous blog post on felting needles). Needle felting has its own logic and ‘rules’ of how it works, and it helps to have some guidance to get a handle (pun not intended) on how to effectively and efficiently make what you want. If you’re self taught and paying attention you’ll get there, but it’s nice not to reinvent the wheel.

So as I was looking around online as if I were someone interested in a workshop, I observed that there are a lot of sources to answer the simple straightforward questions, like:

• Why are my felting needles breaking? You’re applying sideways pressure somehow, make sure to go straight in and out, and don’t try to ‘turn corners’ with the needle. Read more on this topic in this post.

• Which wool do I use? Coarse wool is easier to build up into 3D forms; I prefer Corriedale or Romney as ‘core’ wool to make shapes out of-- save the fine Merino for surface finishes.

• How do I make my needle felting smooth? The more dense and firm your object, the easier it is to get a smooth, even finish-- add loose, fluffy wool going every which way as a finish layer, and (sorry to say) do a LOT of shallow poking all over to tack it in.

Those are important issues, especially for beginning needle felters. But there’s a larger question that seems to float around, hard to pin down and thus harder to answer. What it comes down to is:

Why is my needle felting not working like I want? 

This could mean very different things to you depending on where you are in your needle felting journey. If you’re a total beginner, when you pick up a kit or watch a tutorial online and then try it out, there is often a disconnect between how it is ‘supposed’ to work-- how it is described or appears to work-- and the reality of actually poking wool into the shape you desire.

Part of the problem is a lack of understanding how long it might realistically take to make fluffy wool pack together enough to take on a cohesive shape. (It takes longer than you’d think to get a piece started, that’s the real leap of faith portion… but if you stick with it long enough it will magically achieve workable mass and get a lot easier). 

Part of it is not knowing how firm and structural a thing ‘should’ be, since density is not easily communicated with words or video. (There is no ‘right’ answer here, but more dense is often easier to work with. If you squeeze your felt between your fingers and it squishes down by half, it’s probably too squishy. Add more wool or keep poking in towards its center, or do both). 

Part of it is that people start by making teeny tiny things small enough to fit in the palm of their hand, which is challenging because there’s just so little wool to move around and shape, and at that scale every little poke can make big changes (or disfigure what you’ve already done). When you’re starting out, aim to make something at least as big as your closed fist. Or bigger!

Once you’ve started to find your way around needle felting (and haven’t been scared off by the time commitment and the occasional vicious self-poking of your fingers) that larger question of ‘things not working like you want’ really starts to come into play. Over my ten years of teaching needle felting I’ve noticed that there’s often a point at which students want to move from using a single needle to using multiples. Sometimes this happens quite early on, sometimes it takes a long while. 

There’s the idea that using a multi-needle tool will speed up the process, which makes a lot of sense since it seems like 5 times as many needles should multiply your poking labor and minimize the time required. But that’s often where a big knowledge gap comes into play-- one that no one seems to talk about and one that causes a lot of frustration. 

So I’ll say it again: the placement and quantity of felting needles in your multi-needle holder makes a HUGE difference to your needle felting. How many needles you use at once and how close together or far apart they are will absolutely impact the way the multi-holder tool works for you.

In my studio I keep no less than eight multi-needle tools at the ready- that’s my setup, pictured above, with all of them poked into a foam block and ready to use. You could certainly have just one, but even though it’s easy to open up these needle holders and take out or put in more needles, that takes time, and I like to move smoothly between different tools as I need them. Clearly some of them appear to be the same tool-- I have multiple copies of the knobby wooden holder, some of the pink pen-like tool, a plastic one-- but the different configurations of felting needles in them cause them to effectively behave like different tools, useful in different situations. More on that below (and these are the tools I swear by).

Multiple needle holders are great because they can hold lots of needles, and again, you’d think more needles equals faster felting. That’s true- but really only when you’re working on something flat and thin, so all the needles can enter the wool perpendicular to its surface, and the mass of fiber isn’t so thick that it offers much resistance. That’s what these things were designed for, after all— making flat sheets of industrial felt in a big machine, with hundreds of needles near to each other. But I NEVER find myself using ALL of the holes available in my big knobby felting tools because I generally don’t work flat, I work with three-dimensional forms.

If you HAVE tried multiple needles used together in one tool, you’ve probably noticed that if often just doesn’t seem to work very well. Despite all your hopes, you still keep reaching for a single needle for detailed surface work and deep-poking shaping work. For efficiency you dream of using more than one needle at a time… but in reality too many needles too close together can work against you. That’s the resistance you’re feeling when you start using multiple needles and suddenly they don’t seem to be doing anything. Here’s what’s happening:

A lot of needles really close together actually act kind of like a unit-- like a bed of nails, they distribute the pokiness, and none of them poke in very far, they just work together to push the whole mass. When they’re close together, multiple needles are also more likely to be pushing at different parts of the same fiber, which moves all of them instead of making them rub against their neighbors to tangle together and actually felt.

That can be good when you’re working more at the surface, applying color or smoothing things out. But when you’re trying to initially tame loose wool into a cohesive mass it’s more useful to poke deeply into the wool.

When felting needles are spaced farther apart they are able to actually act on the area underneath and surrounding the needle, penetrating the mass of wool, tangling fibers with each other, and really getting some felting done. Here’s where we get to the visuals.

I’ve decided to coin a term for the effective space around each needle tip: introducing “The Circle Of Tangling.” When the Circle of Tangling of any one needle overlaps with another, they don’t penetrate like a single needle anymore, which means they don’t poke in very far. And the Circle of Tangling differs for coarse, medium, and fine needles.  

Here’s a visual breakdown: 

The smaller or finer the needle (with the confusingly higher number gauge size), the closer together you can place the needles and still have them penetrate the wool. 

The bigger or coarser the needle (with the confusingly lower number gauge size), the farther apart they should be if you want them to really poke in.  Another visual:

For a fine, 40 gauge needle the Circle is about ⅛ of an inch or 3mm wide. 

For a medium, 38 gauge needle that Circle expands to about ¼ of an inch, or 6mm wide.

For a coarse 36 gauge needle that Circle grows to about ½ inch or 12 mm wide. 

That means you want your needles to be no closer than a ‘Circle of Tangling’ width away from each other. Here are more pictures, for those of us who are visual creatures:

Given that reality, it’s pretty handy that most of the readymade multi needle holders out there are already designed with that approximate spacing:

Two different designs of multi-needle holders show that ideal spacing is already designed in; on the small Clover Pen-Style pink tool, designed primarily for fine, detailed work, you can see that the needles are spaced about 1/8” apart. On the larger Colonial Felting Tool 2 you can see that you could choose to use holes about 1/4” apart or far more than that. Don’t think you have to use all the holes all the time.

Here’s the thing: if you use more than one needle but you position them far enough apart that their ‘circles of tangling’ don’t overlap, you can get the effectiveness of a single needle multiplied by the efficiency of more than one needle being used at a time. Read that over again, because I think it’s the most important part of this whole long-winded post.

What does that mean? How does is actually apply to you? Well, take a look at three of my tools:

See all those unused holes? Those are not wasted space. That space gives me a lot of value. It gives me a lot of options for where to put my needles, which makes them effectively become different tools. I keep one holder with two needles about 1/2” apart, one with two 1/4” apart, and one with a single needle. All of these are holding 38-gauge needles, and when I grab any of these three tools and poke them into the same ball of felt they’ll penetrate into it differently. They’ll give a different feeling of resistance, and poke in deeper or shallower.

When I’m just starting in on a piece— let’s say I’m making a ball the size of my fist as a base shape— I’ll use the one on the left with the most spaced-out needles. They can easily poke all the way deeply into the wool I’m trying to tangle into a cohesive blob. At that stage I’m usually adding more wool, turning over the mass, and poking in from all sides. If I added even one more spaced out needle it would still work pretty well, but that’s one more needle to keep track of and not stab myself with, and at that point those needles may be too spread out for the overall size of the thing I’m shaping; one of them might miss entirely or glance off the side, possibly snapping off. And if I tried to use, oh, you know, TWELVE needles, they would barely penetrate at all and would just flatten the whole thing down.

When I’m a little farther in the process I’ll switch to the single needle to start honing the shape (yes, you read that right, a single needle), pushing down any high points and evening things out. When I’m ready to work more at the surface I grab the holder with the two needles 1/4” apart; it’s a good tool for shallower poking as I start to tack on and build up surface details. But then I often grab the single needle tool again(!) on and off throughout the process.

I switch between the different holders with their different configurations of needles quite often as I work on a piece— in response to the feeling of resistance I’m getting, or to poke more deeply or more shallowly. It becomes instinctive, but first you have to make yourself try it and pay attention to what you’re feeling and how things are working (or not working).

It’s surprising to note how differently the tools work and how much you do actually rely on feel as you’re felting. Even with the pen-shaped tool intended for tiny work, it’s remarkable what a difference you feel when using one, two, or three needles in it at a time. I also keep several of those at the ready— see below how I’ve marked dots on their ends with a pen so I can see at a glance how many needles they’re holding? When it comes to detail work I often find that two needles in the pen tool are ideal, because three resist too much and just don’t poke in far enough- by maybe 1/16 of an inch, but hey, that matters if you’re working at a scale small enough to be using this tool.

Speaking of scale, did you see how far apart the needles on those wooden knobby tools are? Can you infer that I’m not working on thumb-sized sculptures when the needles are that spread out? Again I’ll advise working LARGER, especially if you’re starting out, and especially if you want to use more than one needle at a time. You need SPACE. Forget the teeny tiny precious thing. Try something as big as your closed fist, if not bigger. It’s more forgiving and easier, trust me. 

But the bad news is, even with this revelation on spacing out needles to use multiples, you still can’t throw a lot of needles at the problem and felt a lot faster unless you’re working on something bigger, say, head-sized (is it weird to relate everything to body parts?). You will find, I think, that you are working more effectively and efficiently when you’re using a few needles WELL.

As for me, I’m often working with just one or two needles. The effectiveness of the single needle is worth the additional poking, to my mind. Then again, I tend to make pretty firm sculptures (with minimal use of armatures) so it matters to me to have even the core of a piece be pretty structural and dense. I prefer to needle felt pretty deeply.

In conclusion, after 20 years of doing this (and 10 years of teaching it) I see that a lot of frustration in needle felting happens when there's a mismatch between the size, distance, and quantity of needles being used and the goal of the needle felter. So now you know:

If your multiple needles don’t seem to be poking in, try using fewer or moving them further apart. You don’t need to use all the holes in your multi-needle tool.

And when all else fails in a given situation, try using a single needle.

Really understanding how the needles work and trying different gauges and orientations of needles so you know how it feels to use them will really help you be effective AND efficient in your needle felting. You’ve read all the way through this lengthy post, so even if you take nothing else away from it, DO try using one, two, and three needles in different spacing arrangements on the same piece of felt and pay attention to how it feels. I swear it will help you be a better felter.

Want to go over all this and a lot more in video format? My sculptural needle felting masterclass is now available.

Want some guidance on my favorite tools? Check out this page to learn more and get your hands on tools of your own.

I’d love to hear your feedback- leave any questions or comments below.

Behind the Camera- and In Front of the Camera: Making my online needle felting workshop

The bulk of my creative energy these days is going into a project that has been on my mind since the pandemic began canceling live events: an online version of my sculptural needle felting workshop. In a normal year I teach live workshops at two or three different venues, often for a weekend or a week, with occasional one-day workshops thrown in. I love teaching— the energy and enthusiasm I feel for this weird art form is echoed by my students, and we tend to have a great time together. I’m always learning more too— my students ask questions that make me think differently about what I’m doing, why, and how to communicate most effectively. I continue to find that phrasing things several different ways as I talk and demonstrate is a good way to effectively reach the whole group, since we all have different learning styles and metaphors that resonate.

So, if I love it so much, why don’t I teach more often? A lot of it comes down to time. My workshops are often week-long stints at somewhat distant venues (Penland, Arrowmont, California Sculptors Symposium) that require travel and a chunk of time away from home. It’s challenging to manage a good work/life balance with kids, husband, dog, and home when I’m totally absent for a week at a time. I’m a homebody and really love my regular life, so I do one or two week-long stints.

But that means I teach only two or three dozen students in person each year, give or take. I end up filling my workshops with attendees from all over, which is good, but then there are big waiting lists of students who don’t get to work with me. I also know that travel, time, lodging, and funds make it difficult for a lot of people to get away for a week of art camp for grown-ups.

I receive lots of emails from people who find me one way or another and want to start needle felting— but they don’t know where to begin. Or I hear from needle felters who want to know how I get the clean edges and smooth finishes on my work— and there’s only so much you can describe in words. Early in the pandemic I sent out a survey to my mailing list to ask those who might want to learn from me about what topics they’d like to learn about. I heard from beginner, intermediate, and advanced needle felters. Many were looking for more open-ended courses about varied techniques as opposed to the kind of course where you follow along to make a specific project. Many wanted to learn about making more abstract forms instead of cute small animals. Some wanted to learn about armatures and building over other materials, or integrating mixed media. Many want to learn about getting smooth finishes and building forms.

When I teach a live in-person workshop I welcome people at all levels of experience— because I think there’s a lot to learn from the way any individual artist creates her work, especially if she is good at explaining the choices and decisions and techniques she’s using. Over the years I’ve done a lot of troubleshooting and problem-solving with students to figure out what the common difficulties, frustrations, and stumbling blocks can be when it comes to sculptural needle felting. But that was my big hang-up for a long time— I’m so used to working with students one-on-one within the live workshop format, and I think that’s a really valuable aspect to teaching. I couldn’t figure out how to deal with that— because as good as I’ve gotten with Zoom, it’s still so, so hard to connect about a tangible thing when we’re not physically together. The thought of peering through my screen to try to describe how a student could turn their piece over that way and use just a single needle in that section and come at it from that angle, no, just a little closer to where that thin part joins the thick part… that seems exhausting.

So I didn’t do anything about it. For a year.

And then I realized that I still have a ton to offer when it comes to needle felting, and it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. In fact I started plotting out a class that is turning out to be a lot closer to ‘all.’ As so often happens when I get started on something exciting, it grows and develops beyond what I dreamed.

I decided to make a video-based class rather than an interactive Zoom class so I could present information in a structured way with multiple camera angles to best communicate the concepts— and students could pause, rewind, and re-watch as needed. I decided to use a combination of real-time felting with time-lapse portions so students would get a real sense of the time and work that goes in to building up and shaping felt from loose, fluffy wool— but also the satisfaction (and hope) of seeing results as they develop. I decided to build in troubleshooting to address common challenges that crop up. And at first I planned to have a class all about techniques and concepts rather than following along with specific projects. That changed as I realized that follow-along projects could really illustrate those techniques and concepts, AND be a more approachable way for beginning students to engage. So there are some cute little animals mixed in with abstract forms as separate projects within the class— and those who want to use them can, or they can be ignored. The class won’t be all things to all people, because that is truly impossible. But it will take students from the basics of form building through breaking down sculpture into its component parts, dealing with details, getting clean angles and ridges, making vessels, joining parts together, getting smooth finishes, adding color and mixed media, and an introduction to working with support in the form of armatures— building over other materials and inserting wire support.

After a lot of research I plan to release the class through Teachable, an online learning platform that offers what I want for a good user experience.

This is big. I’ve been filming and editing for four months, and I anticipate that the finished product will be ready in mid summer. I’ll have more updates and a firm date for its launch soon.

I’m really excited to share this and I can’t wait to get your feedback!