adam knits!

So, Scout met me in the shop yesterday to help me pick out some rovings and teach me how to needle felt, and that started me on an awesome trip wherein I learned that, needle felting is like the coolest thing I’ve ever done! So this post will be long, so I’m going to give you a teaser picture and make you click through to view the final product, and I must say, it rocks!!!

It all started yesterday after Cricket’s (my mom’s puppy) dog obedience class. We started to head over to Village Wools to meet Jamie, but really wanted lunch, so we stopped at Mac’s Steak in the Rough. Well the food was delicious, but it took FOREVER to get our order, so we were half an hour late, oops! Once we got there, I got to show off the felted bag and everyone really liked it. The one suggestion that people made was that it needed some sort of reinforcement on the handles, which I totally agree with. My mom came up with a genius idea that I’m working on implementing, but that’s another post :)

So anyway, Jamie helped me pick out the colors to match the colors of the 80s Apple logo, and then she showed me how to needle felt on one of the sample bags there in the shop. It was actually pretty easy, I had thought it would be a little bit harder, but it’s really simple to place the roving and just stab away. The only thing I was a bit worried about was poking myself, since I don’t have the best hand eye coordination sometimes.

So I went home and got to work! I wanted a little more practice, so I decided to do some work on my swatch, just to help get the feel for the art a little bit more. Once I had made a small design, I felt a lot more confident that I wasn’t going to poke my fingers off, and I was ready to go!

I printed out an Apple stencil and pinned it to the bag, and started on the design. It took a bit of time and patience, but the whole process is really very easy. If I wasn’t satisfied with how the shape was coming out, all that I had to do was lift up that section and poke at it until it was shaped how I wanted. Very cool stuff.

So a little while later, I was done, and I’ll just let the results speak for themselves. It’s got a very cool feel to it too, because I used a lot of roving, so the pattern is raised up off the bag. It’s a very cool 3D effect.

So there you have it, my first needle felted project! Now I can’t wait to put the finishing touches on the bag, including, a pocket on the back, a sweet button flap with a button Jamie picked out, and some very ingenious reinforced handles.

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p align=”left”>For some more pictures, check out my Flickr set here.