felt brooches

made these needle & wet felted brooches recently as gifts.

this rose brooch idea was taken from the spotlight inspiration room website. basically twirl some wool fibres with whatever shades of colour you want into a small circle, and needle felt them onto a felt sheet (i used dark green). then cut around the needle-felted fibres to make a rose shape. do the same thing, but with green wool fibres and cut it into a leaf shape. sew the leaf & bloom together. sew beads onto the centre of the flower. and finally sew a brooch back / safety pin thing on the back.

this next one was taken from the felting for baby book by saori yamazaki (amazon, book depository)


this one is just a matter of needle-felting two balls, doing the same with the green leaf as the previous brooch (but this time i wrapped the green wool fibres all around the felt sheet, instead of just needle-felting it on to the front side). to attach the two balls together without seeing any stitches, i just ran a threaded needle (cream/pale colour) through both the balls' centres a few times, but making sure to make only a small distance between where the needle exits and re-enters the ball, so that i can just cover the thread that is visible on the surface with some wool fibres (just grab some surrounding fibres to cover the thread & needle felt to cover it). and then did the same thing to attach the leaf to the balls. and then sewed on a safety pin back (sew it higher than what's in the photo, or else the brooch will be too heavy & droop when it's worn).

i actually tried both a dry and wet felting method to make the second brooch. so i needle-felted the fibres into a ball, then i dipped/soaked the ball into some soapy water (a small container of warm water with a small drop of detergent - not too much or else it'll get really bubbly). then i transferred the soaked ball into a zip-lock bag (or just a plastic bag) and squished it a few times in the corner of the plastic bag so that the soapy water can get all the way to the centre of the ball (basically the soapy water acts like the needle to lock the wool fibres together). then i squished the ball in a towel/cloth to get excess water out.
i repeated this process a few times, adding new layers of roughly needle-felted wool on top if the ball wasn't big enough.

i thought this method would be as easy as what's shown in this blog, but no. you can't just magically shake a bunch of wool fibres in a container of soapy water and it somehow transforms into a neat ball.
but oh well, i ended up making the leaf the same way. the advantage of this versus just plain dry-needle-felting is the fibres/ball ends up much neater.

ok. back to studying. bye.