Vegan needle felting 3

It’s been all about the vegan needle felted flowers recently, It started with making a sunflower 🌻 which took forever as there were so many individual petals. I then ironed them (tentively as I thought the acrylic fibre might melt) It didn’t ,it just turned into a flatter denser felt...result!! The middle was a massive pile of fibres which I felted down so it was smooth but still spongy. I then made another one with different tones of yellow in it.

The next flower was a poppy where I also ironed the petals this made them lovely and flat and dense, usually acrylic fibre is kind of fuzzy like stuffing Trouble is ironing the felt made it difficult to give it any shape so I made a cup of fibre underneath to give me something to push against whilst shaping the petals. I made the poppy with 5 petals underneath and 4 on top, few more than a real poppy but looks lusher. I used eyelash yarn to make the stamen’s which I hand sewed onto the centre of the flower.

The next flower was an experiment mixing colours on the petals to give an ombré effect

Today I finished making a multicoloured Zinnia, so many petals! Was worried it would be too flat if ironed the petals so this flower shows how “pouffy” the acrylic fibre is. Some of the colours I mixed myself using two dog slicker brushes to comb two colours together. Pretty pleased how the colours turned out.  

  

Vegan needle felting 2

Hi it's been a long time since I posted. And I've been busy needle felting. Not with bamboo fibres which make hard mean 3D items but with a new fibre called Aclaine from Japan. A company called Hamanaka is producing the 100% acrylics fibre for felting which means it is vegan!!!
http://hamanaka-jp-crafts.com/items/feltwool/aclaine.html

I get mine from an etsy shop called SweetPeaDolls, they are super helpful, they are what's called Embassadors for Aclaine fibre which basically means they sell it in England.

https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/SweetPeaDolls?ref=l2-shop-header-avatar
It comes in a wide range of colours, mainly pretty pastels and fresh bright colours. It felts really well to itself and makes delightfully spongy soft items. It is not so good for thin detail such as stems as the fibres seem short and it retains a lot of air not unlike wadding. I am currently experimenting with it to see what it can do and have made a few flowers, a hamster and some bird brooches.

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The roses were made by creating a sheet of felt first by laying it over a sponge and needling it with the clover 5 needle tool, when doing this it is important to lift the felt frequently so it doesn't stick to the foam. This sheet was then cut into two base pieces per flower and a wavy long strip which I coiled and attached from the middle outwards. This technique came from a lovely new book called Felting fabulous flowers which I got from Amazon. The pansys were also from this book.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1909397393/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Hand sewn jewel

This is the hand sewn jewel using sewn on gems and surrounded by beads sewn on sideways after realising they look so much more effective that way round. I have cut it off the enbroidey hoop and left tabs which i turned under and sewed together as the back. Using the same long thread i sewed the jewel onto the top of one of my shrines.

i think it looks really effective!

Felt shrine with hand sewn jewel and other embellishments.

Embellishments

Inspired by this charity shop find (see below) I thought I would try my hand at making my own embellishments. I have a small stash of beads etc so wil be good to use some of them up.

I first stuck some plastic gems onto felt with my glue gun, this created a problem as it was hard to sew close up where the glue had oozed out. 

This picture shows how messy the glue gets!!! I tried to trim off as much as I could without cutting the felt and sewed beads around the central gem going around twice with the thread to secure. I didn't take photos as I went so this is the final result.

Coin for sizing purposes. Now to decide how I will attach the decoration to the shrine? Glue (messy!) or cut out a neat circle and blanket stitch around. It may be too big for my purple shrine that I am making (?)

Also busy cutting out lots of circles in different colours to make roses.