Felted Pictures Made with Wool Roving

I have had this wool roving for three years - seriously - and haven't got around to using it until now. Yesterday we went to a breastfeeding week event and the girls made little butterflies from wool roving balls felted down. It reminded me that I had some and we should really use it....... so this afternoon we did, and boy did we need that crafting time! My lovely girls have been revolting for the last 24 hours and it turns out they just needed an intensive hour and a half of crafting with Mummy to reset their moodometers to a rosier level!!!!

Eve made a garden with hers - this is quite a late stage where she was agitating the individual pieces on. We tried two slightly different methods - first of all, we made the base then added the 'picture pieces' on top and re felted it. After that we tried putting it all together in one go and felting it under a criss cross cookie sheet. Both methods worked and had different advantages - the first one meant that the felt base was wet and putting the small details on top was easier as they stuck, but the second method felted together more securely. The girls loved doing it and I think we will develop our method as we carry on experimenting!

 This is the first step - make the pieces wispy and spread them out into a shallow tray, dish oven pan etc etc.....

 Make up three layers, placing every new layer at right angles to the previous layer...

 This was the first base felted into a lovely neat round.....

 These are some of the tools that we used to add the detail into the picture - just from the kitchen drawer!! The bubbles are from washing up liquid, as far as I know, any soap will do!!

 We agitated the smaller details by hand - it feels wonderful, all slippy and silky!

 When we thought they were felted enough, we rinsed them under cold water and squeezed the excess out with a tea towel - this is Faith's bucket and spade!

Faith showed Idris how to do some felting - he enjoyed having a go!