Contents
- Welcome to the Needle Felting Tea Towel Tutorial
- Included in the Needle Felting Tea Towel Kit
- Preparing for your Needle Felted Tea Towel Project
- Step by Step Instructions for Creating the Needle Felted Tea Towel
- Wrapping up your Needle Felted Tea Towel
Welcome to the Needle Felting Tea Towel Tutorial
Hello and welcome! If you've purchased the Needle Felted Tea Towel Kit then you're in the right place for all your instructions.If you haven't purchased the kit, feel free to enjoy the tutorial or go get your own kit HERE!
In this tutorial we will go over everything you need to know to create your own beautiful needle felted tea towel to display in your home or gift to someone you love.
If you haven't already, check out the Needle Felting Tea Towel playlist over on YouTubecrafted especially for you and this kit. There is a welcome video from the team, video tutorials and lots of other helpful videos to continue on with your felting skills.
Ready to dive in? Let's go!
Included in your Needle Felting Kit
Included in your Needle Felting kit:
- Beautiful State the Label Checkered Tea Towel
- 4 Colors of Wool Roving
- Felting Needles Pack
- Wool Felting Pad
- All packed in a reusable zipper pouch
Preparing for your Needle Felting Project
Now that you have all your supplies gathered, clear a space where you will have ample working room and set the mood. Put on some music, make yourself a cup of tea. Enter into your project as if you're entering into a ritual -- because you are! You are activating your creativity which is a beautiful practice of love for yourself and the world around you. Take a few deep breaths and allow yourself to get excited! You're about to make something wonderful that will feed a new habit of mending and sustainability and a skill that is priceless. And try to put any thoughts of "I have no idea what I'm doing" or "I'll be terrible at this" aside. It's just not true! You're here to learn and grow -- let's focus on that!
Step by Step Instructions for Creating the Needle Felting Tea Towel
The following instructions will be for creating cutie polka dots on your tea towel. You can follow along just as we describe below, or feel free to make your own shapes and decide on your own placements.
- Start by placing your tea towel onto the felt board and decide on the placement of your first dot. Pick the foundation color for the dot (we chose blue) and pull off as much wool roving as you see fit; but remember, little goes a long way, so don’t tear off too much to start—remember you can always add more wool if you want it to be thicker in both color and size.
- Take your needle (any gauge needle inside the package will do) and start slowly stabbing at the wool repeatedly, being careful not to stab your fingers! The main goal is to imbed the wool fibers into the textile until it becomes felted and very “stuck”. The more stabbing you do, the tighter the finished product will be. Note that the lower tip of the needle is delicate and can break easily. If that happens, no worries! That's why we included several needles in your kit.
- Add color and layers! This part is fun and easy. Take little bits of different colored wool and get creative with your design and placement of the colored roving. We chose to edge the blue dot with some purple wool to define the abstract dot a bit more. Stab repeatedly until it’s felted to your liking. Remember, this is a very straightforward form of handwork so you can make it as tight or as loose as you choose, but the tighter the wool the more “stuck” it will be and will hold up to wear and tear and washing cycles.
- We added an itty bitty tiny red dot off center in the blue section. You can add as many red dots as you like or none at all! This is all about self expression.
- Once you have felted all of the colors and finished your envisioned design you can flip over the hand towel and analyze what we are calling the “wrong” side of the wool. It will be fuzzy and more muted than the front. Just use your needle to stab and reduce the fuzziness a bit. It really won’t effect the right side, just calms the texture down a bit.
- Repeat until the hand towel has a random pattern of happy abstract dots all over. Or as we like to call this, “The funny olive” towel. All done!
Wrapping up your Needle Felting
The sky is the limit to what you can felt with this wool. Maybe after this project you work on some old socks or a sweater that’s been in need of repair! Now that you know the basics of needle felting, you can get creative with the leftover wool. Have fun!
Thanks for following along and growing with us. To continue on your mending journey and learn even more skills, check out the other mending kits and projects. And if you haven't purchased the needle felting kit, you can do that HERE.
See you soon!
xx
The Grow Creative Team