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.

Felting Needles: What Are They and How Do They Work? Explanations with photos and illustrations.

Needle felting as an art form and creative pastime is getting more and more attention lately, and yet I meet plenty of people who have no idea what it is or how (and why) it works to stab at wool until it takes different shapes. At my Open Studio events I find myself giving ongoing demonstrations to ever-changing wide-eyed audiences… who then look around my studio with renewed awe when they realize how my sculpture has come to be.

Demonstrating needle felting to Open Studios visitors. Usually not something I do on my lap for safety reasons since stabbing sharp tools downwards is a key activity.

So if you’re new to needle felting or simply curious, I’m going to give a brief overview of the tool that makes this whole thing possible- with illustrations. 

Felting needles are different from sewing needles or pins: instead of being smooth to pierce through fabric, they have notches cut along their shafts. Those rough notches snag, catch and push fibers they’re poked into, causing them to tangle with their neighbors enough to mat into a mass that has density and form: the nonwoven textile we know as ‘felt.’ 

The tip of a felting needle showing the nearly-invisible notches cut along the shaft.

Wool fibers tangle so well because they are covered in overlapping ‘scales,’ which you can see with the help of a microscope (or a shampoo commercial, or in my illustration below). 

Wool fibers can be smooth (smaller scales) or coarse (larger scales) which affects how easily they mat together as well as how they feel against the skin. That’s a topic we can go into another day. Suffice to say that the notches on felting needles make those scaly fibers grab each other, almost like hook-and-loop fasteners (aka Velcro).  

Felting needles were designed for factory machines; they are made of steel, three or four inches long, with a bent over hook at the top for fitting into said machine and a gradually thinner shaft leading down to a VERY sharp tip. The notches are cut only in the bottom inch or so.

View of an industrial felting machine, aka a needlepunch machine: hundreds of felting needles aligned with holes below move up and down, ‘chewing’ and matting the wool fed into the machine. Photo taken at a restored wool mill called Casari Ranch in Valley Ford, California.

In a factory a big machine full of hundreds of these needles works almost like a mouth ‘chewing’ on wool: each needle lines up with a hole below, so as loose, clean wool is fed into the machine the needles move together like jaws up and down to tangle the fibers into a flat sheet of felt. When you look at a piece of industrial felt you’ll see the many hole marks from the needles. The density and thickness of the batch of felt is determined by how much wool is inserted and how long and how much the needles poke into it.

Industrial needlepunch machines have been in use since the mid 1800s, and they’re very good at making flat, even sheets of felt. But what about working in three dimensions? What about using felting needles by hand? Well, that history starts with a couple creative people looking at a tool with fresh eyes. Eleanor and David Stanwood are credited with first taking felting needles in hand to work ‘in the round’ in the 1980s-- here’s an article that details the beginnings. David reached out to me by email a few years ago when I revealed that I got my start from a book by Ayala Talpai;   it turns out he’s the one who handed Ayala her first felting needle when she visited the couple on Martha’s Vinyard! It’s still a fairly small world, especially when it comes to needle felting..

So to use a felting needle by hand, you need to poke in the direction that you want to shape and compress, almost like squishing clay into shape. You could make a sphere by poking inwards towards the center of the mass of wool from every direction, turning it around evenly as you go. You could make a cylinder shape by rolling the mass of wool like a log as you poke in towards the center. You can make increasingly complex shapes by making simple ones and then joining them together with more wool bridging across. If a piece isn’t dense or firm enough for your purposes you can add more wool and force it into the same amount of space, or else keep poking to compress your form into a smaller and smaller size.

Samples showing progression from roughly humanoid shapes to increasingly detailed and realistic felt sculptures. Note that component parts have been made separately and then joined together after initial shaping.

It’s both incredibly simple in concept and brain-achingly weird at first. Needle felting has things in common with building forms in clay or riveting metal pieces together- except it’s also totally different to have the actual, physical mass of your material change depending on how much you stab at it.

To get started you can literally just start poking at some wool with a felting needle. But of course then you’ll find that there are different kinds of felting needles out there. What’s the difference between felting needles?  Well, basically they differ in size and shape when you look at them in cross-section.

Above is a drawing showing the most common shapes of felting needles: the triangle needle has three edges that can have notches cut, while the star-shaped needle has four edges, and the spiral needle is like a triangle tip that has been twisted. Arguments can be made that the star- and spiral- shape needles do the job quicker because they have more surfaces that notches can be cut into, and more notches equals faster felting. There are people who swear by each type; I advise trying them all and seeing what feels best for you in different situations.

The size of the needle is referred to as its gauge, and the higher the number, the smaller the gauge and the diameter of the needle. 36-gauge needles are ‘coarse,’  38-gauge is all-purpose, 40-gauge is fine, and 42-gauge is the finest. You would choose a higher gauge needle for details or tiny work, or when working with very fine fiber, and a lower gauge for ‘roughing out’ a form, or when using a coarse fiber. 

Every single needle in those multi-needle holders I use is a 38-gauge triangle needle. For the size I tend to work in, that’s all I need.

I myself am not at all a felting needle connoisseur when it comes to the needle choice. I’ll admit I use a 38-gauge triangle needle for almost everything; the exception is when I’m working on something very small, and then I use a 40-gauge ‘fine’ needle. I very often use a single needle in my work (more on why in a moment) but even then I put it in a knob-shaped multi-needle holder; I only use one of the holes. That’s because pinching a single needle in your fingers is REALLY rough on your hand and arm, over and above the repetitive arm and wrist motion needle felting requires.

An important aside: I cringe when I see so many videos and photos online of very sophisticated and skilled needle felters working with a single needle pinched between their fingers. Don’t do it! Find a handle tool you like that fits and fills more of your hand and make it easier on your body. Safety is Sexy! Protect your body so you can do this as long as you want, without hurting yourself. 

Don’t just pinch a single felting needle— it’s really hard on your hand, wrist, and arm. Use a handle— there are a wide variety of multi needle tools available (or you can make one yourself).

So there you have it: a quick introduction to felting needles. In my next post I’ll go into great depth about the ONE thing nobody seems to talk about when it comes to needle felting… I know, you can’t wait!

The variety of multi-needle holder tools I use all the time— even with a solo needle, I still want that bigger grip for the handle.

In the meantime, you can find my recommendations and links for multi-needle holders and other felting tools here.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. If you’re ready for the iceberg, you can sign up for my in-depth sculptural needle felting video-based class here. 

Please comment or ask any questions below; what else do you want to know about my technique and process?

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!

Finally OUT of the Studio: InTouch fiber sculpture is being touched by museum visitors!

It’s real! It’s alive! InTouch is now open to visitors at the de Saisset Museum, and it’s a hit!

Last Thursday the opening reception was packed with friends, loved ones, and also total strangers who came out to see the debut of my human-scaled touchable sculpture. It didn’t take much convincing to get people to touch. It was just as I had hoped and pictured— the mysterious but approachable forms seemed to draw visitors in, and not just kids— although they were the first to dive in. And the photos are pretty great:

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