Needle Felting a Heart

Everyone loves a heart, I know this one will be a popular little make!

Felt a Heart

This tutorial shows you how to make a perfectly shaped heart, look out for the secret tool which helps you make the same shape every single time, a must if you’re creating a few to be used together in a photo shoot. There’s a specific way of adding the wool, step by step in order to produce a perfectly smooth and neat heart, complete with secure outer shell and squishy middle! I show you how to felt a heart using carded wool and hand dyed top.

Tools

• Foam and Felting Needles
• Cookie Cutters – plastic, Depth: 1.5cm Width: 6cm and 4cm

Materials

• Wool, any colour you want – carded wool or roving which is the ideal wool for needle felting. Watch the videos here for more details. Remember Shetland will be easier to felt but Merino will be softer

Time for 6cm heart

• 30 minutes for a basic finish
• 45-60 minutes for a more perfect, tighter felted finish

Time for 4cm heart

• 20 minutes for a basic finish
• 30-40 minutes for a more perfect, tighter felted finish

Foam, Felting Needles and Heart Cookie Cutters

Once you’ve felted a heart you can felt all sorts of shapes using cookie cutters!

Hand Dyed Wool Top

Hand Dyed Wool Batting (carded wool)

Felt a heart using Wool Batting… Watch the video below to find out how to do it!

TIPS for making the wool smooth…

• Choosing the right wool is VERY important! This can help the process and make your hearts soft to the touch. A Merino batt is the best choice, soft and easy to needle felt!
• Don’t be afraid to use lots of wool for the initial “fill” The end result wants to be thick and solid, but still squishy. You don’t want thin and floppy!
• Place your next layer of wool flat over the heart and pull tight by turning over and pushing into the cookie cutter, ensuring each layer is flat and smooth and tight will really help you create that smooth final finish
• Once you have the main base done and take it out of the cookie cutter to felt the edges, make sure you regularly put your heart back into the cookie cutter to maintain the perfect shape and make sure you don’t end up slightly mis-shaped!
• Wool does shrink the more you felt it, be aware of this if you want to make a matching set! Use the cutter shape and keep adding more wool!
• Final touches when all wool has been attached…Needle Felt any bits of wool that look loose, soft rather than a tight finish. Then use the “frequency separation” technique… see below

If you’ve ever tried frequency separation in Photoshop to smooth out skin, then you will know what I’m talking about!! As you stab away repeatedly you need a strategy and not randomly poking anywhere! This may result in some areas super well felted and others not giving you an uneven look!

The strategy!  As you stab make sure you are constantly rotating your heart and felting all over everywhere and not consternating in one area at a time. When you’ve done a general all over, you then need to squint at the surface and see the light patches (raised wool bits) and darker patches (lower wool bits). This image below made into blank and white shows up the light and dark areas, in fact you can see dark grey, a mid grey and white. The aim is to make the whole surface one level and therefore smooth, so….. you only want to stab into the light areas to make them match the darker bits! Really hope this makes sense!

Partly needle felted heart, showing the uneven surface. Thinking about your felting in terms of light and dark will help you create a super smooth surface.

Finished felted heart, super smooth surface, no dents, not light and dark like in the first photo. Do your hearts need to be this perfect? No certainly not, but the better it looks the more professional your photos will look and the more the surface is felted the longer your heart will continue to look beautiful as it gets used again and again. If it hasn’t been felted fully, it can end up a fluffy mess and you’ll end up having to make another one!

Felt a heart using Wool Top… Watch the video below to find out how to do it!