Embroidery Meets the Needle-Felting Machine

comments (0) May 25th, 2008

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Jennifer Stern, contributor

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Here’s a picture of my first project with needle felting. I love how these jeans came out.

Here is a picture of what the needle felting looks like right-side up.

This is what the felting looks like with wrong-side up.

My friend Gail’s red wool skirt features an awesome combination of needle felting and machine embroidery.

Gail used this pretty floral motif all around the hem of her skirt, and it looks amazing.

Here’s a picture of my first project with needle felting. I love how these jeans came out.

Photo: Len Hasemann

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OK, I am completely into the new needle-felting machines. My first project was on a pair of jeans, and I was dying to transform them with my new toy! I started at the hem and punched my way all the way up the leg. Let me first say that it was very liberating not to have to rethread, worry about tension, or breaking threads, but there were some broken needles, though.(I tend to be a little bit of a speed demon.) The best part was that I didn’t have to wind any bobbins!

Essentially, needle felting is the process of laying down fibers such as wool roving, punching them into your base fabric, and then locking them into position by turning the fabric over and punching from the wrong side.

Shortly after that, my very good friend, Gail, showed me a skirt she was working on. She was embroidering the hem of a red wool skirt with light outline designs that were specifically digitized to be used with these felting machines.

After she embroidered the designs, she iced the surface of the embroidered floral motifs with a light coating of wool roving—it really looks great!

Many of my customers buy these cool new toys, but they don’t have the inspiration to use them, or worse, they doubt their ability to be creative with a new medium. Dust off that needle-felting machine, and add some texture to simple outline-embroidery designs. Once you've seen how easy it is to “color” in your outline motifs, you’ll be off felting all sorts of stuff!

posted in: embroidery, needle felting

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