How To Felt Basic Shapes?

As you start to make basic shape for your buddy's body or head, you must learn to sculpt your wool into any shape you want by using felting needles. When you start it, you will see how easy it is to work with felt. The more time you poke on a certain area, the tighter the area is going to be. That also means this area will look sunken when it compared with its surround areas. So it is a basic and the most important skill to learn in the felting art. You will find you usually spend 1 hour to felt a firm and perfect shape you want. 

The process of felting a basic body shape is right here. You will use it in almost all the projects for your toys. Go back to this page anytime you need a refresher.

1. Take certain amount of wool and roll it.

2. Use your hands to roll the wool tightly. The tighter, the easier and faster you will spend in the next step. Because the tighter, the more of the shape that your needle will pass through at once.

3. Place the wool piece on your felting foam block, or other softer surface like wool mat. Poke repeatedly into the wool. You will find you averagely poke a thousand time for a firm perfect body shape by using 2 felting needles. 

4. Multi-needle tool is your best friend to help you speed up the felting process. 

5. Continue felting the wool until the shape is been evenly poked and round. To make it even, you don't have to poke deeply each time, just find the right strength you need to make it even. Like what I said use the felting needle to sculpt the shape you want.

Totoro Is Smiling To You!

This Totoro is more popular than any other buddy now. I posted it on my MakeWoolBuddies Facebook page three weeks ago and according to the crowdsourcing, this smiling Totoro was the big winner in the “beauty contest”. Haha, I'm so happy here, because I AM the maker of this perfect, vivid, fantastic, incredible Totoro ^0^!

So, if you want to learn the process of making a Totoro like this, you are on the right truck! Today, I'm going to write down the secrete process of making it. You can do it too as long as follow every step carefully! Ok, grasp some wool, a needle, let's do it!

1. Take a small handful of white wool, roll the wool tightly to make the base for the body shape. By compressing the wool together, the needle helps you speed up the felting process. Continue poking the wool until the shape is evenly round and like an egg.

2. Stretch a layer of gray wool to fully cover the body shape, then tighten it with felting needles.

3. Roll a small handful of white wool into an oval shape for the bust and tummy. Poke the white wool onto the front of the body, leaving half of the height for the head area.

4. Using small amount of gray wool, make one tail and two arms. You can just make three rounded balls. Poke the tail onto the lower back of the body, poke the arms on each side, and felt them together. 

5. Add more gray wool to help connect the edge of arms with the body, keep poking until they connected naturally. Now it's time to make its head part.

6. Stretch proper amount of while wool and poke it onto the face part, shape the teeth part by using your felting needle while poking. Likewise, poke two soybean-sized eye areas and black-soybean-sized nose area. Eye areas should be white and nose area should be gray. For Totoro's ears, make two black-soybean shapes and poke them on its head. 

7. Make some gray spots on the bust (like what I added in the picture above).

8. Eyes, nose and teeth. Roll two pinches of black wool and poke into the center of the two eye areas for pupils. Stretch a triangular nose on the nose area, make sure the base of the triangle up, then add two brown nares on it. The teeth part is the finishing point. For this part, remember the more you poke, the tighter the wool going to be? So my secret is using NO more wool but ONLY felting needles to poke them out! Be patient to poke hundred times for all the lines, lines must be absolutely straight since it affects the energetic smile directly! 

Wow! You just finish your own smiling Totoro! Congrats!

Learn To Make Your Wool Buddy Popular

  Two days ago, I asked my fans to make a choice between 2 completed wool Totoro (Cartoon character in Japanese animated film My Neighbor Totoro, which is written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki and produced by Ghibli Studio) on my Facebook Fan Page. And I get a lot of answers and reasons of their choice. In order to get an objective and fair answer, I didn't tell them whom the 2 Totoros were made by. But at the end I told every choice maker that I made the smiling one. Here's the captured answer from this post:

Here is the result: 8 among 9 people chose Totoro B (the one has a green background). Big win of B! Only one person TingTing Xu chose the other one. Apparently, I get a very clear answer from this compare, totoro on the right side is the more popular buddy from people's aesthetic value. 

I find there are some factors or values make the Totoro B super popular according to the choice from the crowd:

1. Cute "Tosonality". It's the most frequent word appears in the comment board. That means it's really important for a buddy. Yali Yao, Ruichen Zhou and Justin Xu thought Totoro B was "cute". Dalu Li said "the left one is so ugly" and we can regard this reason as "not cute enough". While "cute" means a lot of things: good shape, proper scale, balanced design etc. Like Xiangfei Bai wrote "this one is really more three-dimentional" when it refers to Totoro B, so I believe he was talking about its chunky body and well-balanced shape.

2. Energetic Facial Expression. Both Ruila and Yali said they like B's "teeth", they like the smile on its face, so we see YiWen Hu wrote "Totoro B makes me feel hopeful and energetic". I guess the smile on B give this buddy more possible to be liked since people released their pressure after viewing it. That's also the reason why Ruila Lin said she felt the "humor inherent and full of surprise".

3. Details make it "alive". Angel Cabrera and Xiangfei Bai mentioned "detail" was the key factor helping them made the choice. Actually, details really helpful to emphasize the vivid feature of a buddy. But too many details could be a burden for a little craft. So that's the reason why Xu Tingting prefer the abstract one. After all, it just a wool craft or toy, we don't have to add every detail on it. So keep a balance on it will be an essential part.

4. Restore the original figure. Dalu Li said "because it looks like real totoro", which pointing out the more it likes the original character, the more he likes it. So here is someone who prefer concretization more and by no means dislike the abstract one. And YiWen Hu wrote "A looks like a nerd Totoro", that is a compare with the existing figure.

So now we get four principles from this crowd: Cute Figure, Facial Expression, Details, Revivification (if it has a well-known figure already). From now on, you will be able to design and make wool buddies that most people will love!

Faster And More Comfortable Than Ever!

      Remember the secret tool for felting? Yes, felting needles. It usually take me 15~20 minutes to felt an egg sized wool penguin by using only two felting needles. In fact, it takes fewer minutes if I use handheld needle felting tool with multiple needles! Why? Because it's more comfortable and faster. Just like the wooden handled tools in the above picture. However, you have to know it is impossible to use the multiple needle tool from the beginning to the end unless you are felting a wool pat. The truth is you need both multiple needle tool the and single one every time, because what you are felting is vivid animals that has subtle characters needs to be done by single felting only. For example, the eyes and mouth of the penguin. The less needles you use, the more elaborate for targeting a certain small part of your work. 
      Multiple needles tool isn't necessary for every work, but  it will definitely save your time when doing less detailed work on a larger surface of the buddy. For instance, it takes only 5 minutes to create a body base for your penguin, yet takes more than 10 minutes when you use single or 2 needles. So, trust me, you will certainly love it when you deal with something bigger.

    

Recommendation Of The Felting Book!

      

There are so many felting books in the market, and if you are a very beginner, you might get lost in those various books or waste a lot of time on picking the best one. WOOLBUDDIES (20 Irresistibly simple needle felting projects) is the one I want to recommend at here, it's written by Jackie Huang. It introduces from raw materials and tools to challenging wool buddies.  It's a wonderful choice for beginners! Actually, it still can be an inspirational book if you are an ace of felting. 

Although everyone may has a different taste, the book above is favorite one for making wool animals or pets.  It's up to you, some people just like buddies with true-life looking. But for me, this book is totally my style. In other words, I love my buddies look cute and, to some extent, awkward and stupid. Why? For two reason. I want them creative and reflect their cutest side from our heart within. And, they are made for relaxing our mind. For my own experience, they make me feel relaxed and so happy when every time I completed one of them. If you keep following me, you will find my buddies will keep cute, stupid and creative. Ahaha~~

You can easily new one or used book from Amazon, which allows you to preview some pages of it. Check it out first, then you will decide weather you like it.