Yarn scraps for needle felting

I always have yarn scraps hanging around.. when I got my felting needles a couple of weeks ago 

I decided to use this gallon sized bag stuffed full to practice ... 

Okay over three weeks later I will admit I had no clue how much effort and time it would involve... 

I pulled colors as I needed them for whatever project I was working on.. some days I sorted colors out and just worked on brushing.. for hours at a time 

I got a couple of dollar store pet brushes.. around the end of week three they started losing some of the metal bristles .. but as many dozens and dozens of hours as I put them through hard brushing, I think they held up pretty well for the price..

 I had everything from nice super soft shiny to down right harsh scraps.. mostly in between stuff like Red Heart... 

In my experience Red Heart was much easier to brush out and quicker to felt then the smoother shinier Simply Soft scraps although they did make for some beautiful monster hair LOL ( post coming soon )

Red Heart before 

and after brushing 

I finally finished brushing the last of the scraps out last night after doing another marathon of six or seven hours straight.. ugh 

and I have a shopping bag full of baggies still left after dozens of smaller projects 

Side note 

I actually had to buy a box of sandwich baggies.. not something I do often .. I reuse them over and over again until they literally fall apart.. apparently it's been a few years as I could only find a few.. well I should be set for some time now ...... 
 

A few upcoming projects will be .....

I am going to try my hand at glitter eyeballs and polymer clay claws.. I just found some polymer clay at the dollar tree, small amounts in five or six different colors I think ... per pack just perfect size for doing some claws and possibly some beaks

As soon as I manage to de-scent my new pattern books enough to work with I'll start a few of these...

 Look at those hats on the Impkins... definitely looking forward to this... They are in a bag of dry rice .. slowly getting better... I could live without the added fragrance .. if it takes too much longer I am going to resort to taking photos of the pages LOL in the meantime I'm going to work on glitter eyes

Oh and the hairy monsters post 

Planning on mixing up some embroidery needle felting and beads also... 

Needle felting with acrylic yarn

Just over a week ago I came across the YouTube video on needle felting eyes on to amigurumi, they looked really impressive...

 the one thing I don't like about crocheted eyes is they tend to be a bit bulky and raised, safety eyes are not always a good choice and also can be too bulky on small dolls, embroidery eyes can be difficult to get to lay right  ..  which is especially noticeable on small dolls....

 these were nice and smooth, but being extremely allergic to wool even though I have wanted to try needle felting for ages I thought that was something I would never be able to do.. 

Being burned out on news but still needing something to run in the background while I was working on my latest project, I let a few more needle felting videos play... one mentioned using acrylic yarn... 

That one mention was enough to get me searching online to see if I could find any more information about this.. 

Information is actually pretty limited, most everything directs towards wool, there were enough little bits here and there to convince me it was doable, wet felting of course is not but dry needle felting is... 

My intention was to just get a cheapy set from Amazon and try making a few eyes.. I mentioned this to one of my sons while I was searching on Amazon, asked him what he thought about it...  his input was... to get a better set of needles with a variety of different needle types to see which would work better.. I'll admit it didn't take much to convince me as this is really something I wanted to do for a long time... as I had just sold a few patterns, my practice is to put a little bit back into my crafting every few items sold at least, it seemed like really good timing..

I was going to start with practicing eyes but decided to watch a video on basics and they recommended starting with shapes, first being a ball.. my son walks in and asked what I'm making I tell him I'm making a ball for practice.. he's like no really what's it going to be you don't ever just practice without making something, I laughed and said I only had the set for like an hour he couldn't expect need to actually be able to make anything with it.. 

well that was enough to get me thinking that instead of just making a round ball I should try something I had wanted to do, so I started with one mushroom and another... decided it needed some grass or ground or something to put it on, that needed something with it which turned out to be a bunny not sized to scale or anything just something I wanted to try using just scrap ends.. the ball is now a bush.. still haven't finished with that video ( photo at top ) 

That lead to making more small items... 

I have been working on key chains, charms and such as I like to have plenty of small, low cost items on my tables at markets and was running low..

Still using just scraps I made a few hearts.. 

Along the way I decided to try a landscape.. 

Definitely need to work on building up skills for landscapes lol... had no clue what I was doing but it was fun .. at that point I was going on over 30 hours of no sleep .. the big take away from that was you shouldn't play with super sharp needles when you're really tired... and maybe should plan things out a little bit better..

I did practice eyes... once so far lol ..