Little needle felted beaver

I'm making a little beaver with wings, and I thought I'd show a bit of the process.

There's the beaver. Then a shot of the two wings. The top one is done-ish and the bottom one is half felted.

Once finished with both wings, I roughly attached them to the beaver's back. Notice that I left the tails of the wings with rough felt. That loose wool I can use as glue to felt into the beaver's body and wrap around the base of the wings and felt into both parts to attach everything together. I leave a good amount, I want the wings to be nice and stable.

Don't be afraid to add some extra felt to adhere the wings either, you want the fibers that are on the wings to go deeply into the beaver, the tangle between fibers needs to be nice and tight.

And once it's done, you get my last pictures, beaver with little wings!

Needle Felting: Rubber Duck and Bluebird

After felting a few of the cats, I decided to try to do something different. I figured a bluebird and rubber duck would be fun and I had a lot of these colors, so I went for it.

The bluebird turned out pretty cute!

What this? A cat paw?

Nooo! Destruction of the bird! (And cheeseburger I made for the Binx cat) Oh the humanity!

Note: Cats adore wool, that's why a lot of people who felt also make wool felted cat toys.

But don't worry, the bluebird was rescued safely and is just fine. I think he looks really cute. 

The rubber duckie was next. I wanted to make him with a really silly expression. The beak was hard because my needles weren't the best. I hadn't bought small needles yet. So at this point the beak was rather big. So big I had to felt in a bunch of extra felt on his tail so he wouldn't topple over face first!

Lucky for the duck you can't see the extra felt on his tail because I felted it in so tightly.

Look at that cute expression! He just wants to be picked up and held! I do like the way his beak turned out. It's big and cute. I've since touched it up with the smaller needles so it does close a little more on the sides.

Needle Felting - The Fifth Cat - Gordon

I feel proud of this one! Gordon turned out really well, clipped ear and all! I finally got the ear proportion correct and the felting as tight as I could with the needles I had. I later found out I had only large needles, and there were much smaller needles available.

The back legs and tail were finally built up very well. I learned how to put extra felt around the tail so the tail was attached tightly to the body after more reading up on felting. I also learned the technique of felting with my needles at an angle instead of straight on, which helps felt colors on more evenly with fewer stray hairs. 

Kendall had to make an appearance during my photo shoot.

Without the added fish I made. I worked hard on the face and eyes, using tiny bits of felt with my large needles to get such details. It took a lot of work and a lot of patience was needed, but I like the look I got.

Needle Felting: The Fourth Cat - Binx

I got a lot better! I watched a lot of youtube videos at this point and realized I needed to work on how tightly I was felting. Once I gave myself permission to felt and realized over-felting would be very difficult, I was able to achieve much better results. 

You can see the back is still too loosely felted. It looks a little lumpy. The head, neck and back transition is not smooth and later I went back to smooth this out.

I did get a very good detail work in the legs and arms. I tried make Binx look like he was sitting really cute and for the most part, I got the look I wanted. I noticed the black felt didn't show the details of the arms, so I put some dark red felt in the edges so it would make a little contrast. You can see that from the camera flash.

Later I made a tiny cheeseburger to go with Binx. You can see Vivi's paws here, she likes to try to eat wool Binx.

Once again, though, I made his ears too big. 

Needle Felting: The third cat - Kendall

This time I have a in progress picture. I was getting a lot better at the faces of the cats as I tried to make Kendall in cat form. The ears? Not so much. The ears are way to big!

Look at the eyes and the mouth! Not bad! The ears look like fox ears, so they really do need to be smaller. I intend to redo her ears some day so she looks a lot better.

Side view. I was figuring out the tail, arms and feet. I used thread on her paws and whiskers.

Back view to show that I was learning how to get the colors attached so they stuck correctly. It takes a lot more work than I thought at first to get the wool to stick. Everything needs to be well felted, not mildly felted.

This is what my shelf looked like. I was putting all my felted critters up on one shelf.