Winter Break - Great Classes #1 -- Felted Hearts

Nothing like packing all your fun stuff into one weekend. But after the Deep Freeze (aka The Polar Vortex) and a fast and extreme warm-up, I was ready to get out of the house! So, I enjoyed two very different kinds of classes -- one in fiber, the other, cooking. Fiber first.

This was a felted hearts class with one of my favorite instructors, Barb Hranilovich, who makes classes such fun I'd take something I'd hate just to spend time in her class. In this case, no problem, because we were making lovely, large hearts using needle felting.

I'd done a teeny bit of this in another class by Barb that also included wet felting. This time it was all dry, all needles. We started out with a piece of fiber fill to make a heart shape, which we wrapped in wool yarn.

We used fiberfill because to use the wool roving would be expensive. And we used the wool yarn and wrapped it well because you must use wool or when you begin to felt, the barbs on the (very) sharp needles won't grab the material and bind it together. They wouldn't be able to "grab" anything if we only used the fiberfill.

When the heart was wrapped we put our roving over it in a thin layer.

And you poke the poop out of it with these little needles that when they go into your finger because you weren't smart enough to keep it out of the way, makes you wince!

We kept building layers, poking, poking, poking, until it was smooth.

It slowly comes along. Millions of pokes!

And when you are done, you end up with something that looks like this on the front side...

...and this on the back.

I loved doing it so much that I went home and immediately started a little sheep from a kit I received for Christmas.

It's supposed to be a pin but it was too big so now it's a pincushion for my new hobby!

Just what I need. A new hobby!

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