For more information on needle felting basics, and for other needle felting projects, check out these tutorials:

• felt beads – basic wet felting & needle felting methods
• needle felted mice
• needle felted bacon bracelet

—————————————————-

Putting it all together:

1) Start with the white wool. You’ll need to tear off a smaller piece of wool to begin with. To do this, unwind the roving so it’s in a long thick rope. Place your hands about 6 inches apart and pull firmly. If the roving doesn’t come apart, put your hands a little further from each other, and pull again. The roving should break fairly easily. You can pull your smaller bit of roving apart some more, until you have a piece about the size of the one in the second photo below.

 

2) Ball one end of the roving up. Continue rolling the rest of the roving up into a ball, keeping it as tight as possible. Roll the entire piece of wool up this way, and place it on top of the foam, pinching it together between thumb and forefinger.

 

3) Hold the wool in one hand, on top of your foam block. Take your felting needle and stab the wool with it, straight up and down. Always keep your eyes on the needle. Roll the ball around, continuing to stab, so that you are stabbing all sides of it equally, keeping its round shape. The ball will compress and grow smaller as you stab, and as the fibers lock together. Continue stabbing and stabbing, and the wool will continue to compress and take shape.

Be sure to hold the needle at the top and in the middle, putting no pressure on the lower end, or it will break. Also be sure to keep the needle straight. And, as mentioned, always keep your eyes on the needle and the fingers that are holding the wool away from where you are stabbing. Go slowly at first until you feel comfortable increasing your stabbing speed.

This is basically all there is to needle felting. With practice, you learn how to control and shape the fibers with your needle tip, stabbing more where you want to make an indent or compress the wool, adding more wool onto the shape, etc.

 

4) To make the ball larger, take another piece of wool roving and wrap the end around the ball you’ve made. Stab the end into place a bit, then roll the rest of the roving around the existing ball, and stab it smooth and into place, building on the surface of the ball you’ve created. Now you’ve got your eyeball – you just need to add iris and pupil.

To make a significantly larger ball (like for a pet toy), I rolled some long strips of actual white felt (like, the fabric) into a ball and needle felted those together roughly (yes, you can do this – more on that sometime later, but there are some amazing things you can do by needle felting shapes cut from felt onto other things…), then wound white wool rovings around that and continued making the eyeball as described in the rest of this tutorial. This meant that I could make a much larger eyeball much more quickly, because normally to make a needle felted ball larger than about an inch or two across, you’re starting to look at way more time and stabbing…

In the end, the wool ball should be quite solid. You should be able to squish it a bit between your fingers, but only by pressing quite firmly. Needle felting can create objects nearly as hard as a marble, if you continue stabbing and compressing for long enough.

5) Take a small piece of your coloured wool roving, and wind it around into a flat circular shape. Place this shape on top of the white eyeball. To make a multi-coloured iris, place portions of two (or more) colours of wool on top of each other to form one length of wool roving. Pull this length apart, put it back together, lather rinse repeat. Basically, use your hands to mix the colours together. You simply want to be sure that you still start and end with the wool’s fibers facing in roughly the same direction, in vertical lines.

 

6) Stab the coloured circle into place on top of the ball, using the tip of your needle to shape and even out its edges as you go. You will notice that you can use your needle tip to push the wool circle inward, making it smaller, or to push it outward, widening it. If the circle is too small, add more wool around its edges, stabbing it into place.

 

7) Once the white circle is solidly in place, take an even smaller piece of black wool and do the same thing to create a flat coloured circle in the middle of the white circle.

 

8) If desired, you can then take a very small bit of white wool roving, ball it up, and stab it into place in one corner of the pupil, to create the impression of light reflected in the eyeball. It adds some depth and interest – I pretty much always do this step.

 

9) To turn your eyeball into earrings or a pendant, or to string several eyeballs together into a garland, simply use a long, thick sewing needle to make a hole through the middle of the ball.

To string eyeballs on a garland, just thread the needle with string/wire/yarn/embroidery floss/etc. and pull the needle through the eyeball.

To put a head pin or other jewelry wire through the eyeball, I use an unthreaded needle, push it through the center of the wool and leave it sitting there sticking out either side of the eyeball. Work it around a bit, trying to enlarge the hole. Then pull it out and immediately thread the pin or wire through the hole. Sometimes it takes a few tries to get the hole to stay present enough for the wire to be pushed through.

To make a larger hole, start with the needle, then work your way up to thicker objects poking through the eyeball, such as a dollmaking needle, a bamboo skewer, a bead holer.

 

10) Wear, display or throw at an unsuspecting coworker. Or give to your dog just before he trots to the door to greet visitors. “Oh heavens, WHAT is your little Fido chewing on?!”