sculpting

Caution: Needles are skin-piercingly sharp.

Note:

• Only the first third of your needle does the work. No need to bury your needle into your work pad.
• Occasionally lift your fiber away from the pad to avoid it becoming permanently attached.
• Needles are brittle. Be sure your needle goes in and comes back out using the same angle to avoid breaking it.

Materials and tools needed for this project:

• Felting needles (38 or higher gauge recommended)
• Felting pad (foam most often used)
• Bamboo skewer
• Autumn colored roving (approximately 1/4 ounce)
• Acorn cap and glue (optional)

 Creating the leaf:

1. Place a leaf shaped cookie cutter on a backing pad. (You may use a paper pattern instead.)
2. Fill the cookie cutter loosely with wool roving layered perpendicularly in appropriate fall colors.
3. Slide your needle down all around the inside edge of the cookie cutter twice to to create a silhouette, before lightly tacking down the rest. Make sure to gently work the fiber into all the nooks and crannies. Add more fiber as needed.
4. Once you have lightly compacted your wool, gently lift your fiber from the mat and flip both the cutter and wool over. Lightly needle the “backside”.
5. When smoothed down, pop your piece out of the cutter. Finger your leaf to check for sparse areas and smooth out the needle marks.
6. Gently poke the edges to clean them up.
7. Needle additional fiber to fill in or sculpt areas as desired.
8. Add realism by folding and poking to curl your leaf.

Creating Acorn Nut:

1. Pull a small amount of fiber and wrap it tightly around a skewer with more fiber at the top than the bottom.
2. Carefully avoiding the skewer, use your needle to tack the fiber together.
3. Add more fiber, tacking as you go until it is a bit larger than the size you want your finished acorn to be.
4. Push the fiber off the skewer and continue to shape it by carefully needling to compact the fiber.
5. Roll between your hands to smooth out your acorn.
6. Create your own cap by felting a circle with a ridge, forming a little cup. Needle your cap onto the top of your nut.

Optional: Needle your nut into an actual acorn cap.

1.  Remove an acorn from it’s cap. Add a bit of glue to the cap then your felted acorn  into the cap.
2.  Once the glue is dry needle your acorn to your leaf.