Making a Clean Line Between Two Colors

Make a clear line between two colors is a very important skill in wool felting. It determines how vivid and clear the craft's looking is. Now, I will tell you a easy way to felt all the wool fibers in the right part of your toy.

When taking the amount needed of the color you're adding on, you will always find the fibers are disorder and go everywhere. So, you need to use your hands to fold it over to form a straight, even line. Then cover it to the right part of the body or wherever is needed. Take this black wool as example.

Like so. Place this black strand on the basic body and gently poke along the fold to set into place. The magic weapon here is your needle. Use your felting needle to round up your edge, then poke it. Beginners might need more practice on this skill. But you will find it's so easy when you make most of your needle out.

By the way, good felting needles usually with long service life and can help shrinking the time you spend on you craft. The last picture shows my favorite brand of felting needle. They are my magic tool.

Don't You Dare As Cute As Me! I'm A Guinea-pig.

Chocho, the Guinea-pig is a new friend here, everyone loves his cute looking, soft and chunky body. But Chocho here is to tell people he is absolutely one of the top friends to people to keep accompany with. Chocho loves lying on your stomach while you are reading on your couch. Don't worry, he will never eat your Twilight of limited edition like a mouse usually do. Ok, are you ready to make a new friend for yourself?

Step one: Take some white wool, roll it into a ball. Then, use your felting needles to poke it repeatedly until it becomes an egg-shape body.

Step two: Take a small amount of light brown wool and roll it in to four mini balls as his feet. Attach the four balls on the body shape and poke each of their bottom to fasten them on the surface of the body. Like so. 

Step three: Take some brown and black or yellow wool if you like to your guinea pig pattern by needling in different spot shapes and sizes on the back and head area. The amount and shape are up to you. Just make it natural.

Step four: Take some black wool and roll it into a mini ball as his nose. Poke it on one end of the egg-shape body.

Step five: Use white wool make two balls as his eyes. You can make one bigger than the other. Use a tiny amount of black wool as the pupils. I like to poke them in to the center. But you can change the position to change the expression.

Step six: Take a small amount of brown wool, roll it and poke it on your foam block or any soft surface like wool pad. This time, you need to make two semicircular ears. Be aware of using felting needle when you dealing with small amount of wool. 

Step seven: Poke the bottom of the ears on the back apart and behind the eyes. 

Tada~! He's ready to lie on your stomach! Let's be the best friends to each other!

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. 

    

New Buddy! Mr. Dragon~ Enjoy the sunset

 Have you ever seen the beautiful sunset at San Francisco Ocean Beach? Our new buddy Mr. Dragon just enjoyed his wonderful afternoon over there. Want to know more Mr. Dragon's trips in SF? Keep your eye on coming posts! You will find out he's never a dragon, trust me!

Wool or Woolen Yarn?

               

    It's a hot question for a beginner to ask. What kind of wool I need? Wool or Woolen Yarn? Actually if you see the finished cute buddies, you will know the answer. Woolen yarn is another format of tightened wool, you can hardly change the shape of it. But if you want it to be a part of decoration for your wool buddies, that's terrific! However, when you need a soft, cute and fatty wool buddy, colored wool is the only and best choice. 

     Colored wool is a wonderful material, which allows you present your subject with more choices of creation. We will talk about how important it is next week.

  

2 Minutes To Learn To Make A Wool Penguin

Come on, let's do it for real. This is my home-made video, hope you will like it.

Comments are welcomed.

First Try! Make A Wool Penguin In 5 Steps!

Today you will learn how to make a wool penguin in five steps.

The material you will need is white, black, gray and yellow wool.

You will also need a piece of foam and felting needles.

Step 1:  scroll the white wool, then use the felting needles to tighten it till it like an egg.

Step 2: use gray wool covering half of the egg to make its body area; use black wool to cover the other half as its head area, and then tighten it.

Step 3: use small amount of white wool to make two rounded areas…

Be sure to tighten then into quarter-sized rounds.

Use a little white wool to connect the bottom of two round areas.

Step 4: rub a tiny amount of black wool and poke it into the center of each eye area. Tiny eyes will be cute.

The last step: roll the yellow wool into a pea sized mouth for your penguin. Then poke it to the center of the connected position of the eye area.

Now your wool penguin is done! 

So exciting right? Next time, I will tell you the secret of the magic tool -- felting needle.