Introduction to Needle Felting
Felting with wool is one of the oldest textile art forms, dating back to the Neolithic Stone Age. Early civilizations in Egypt, Turkey, and China used needle felting to embellish their textiles. Needle felting as an art form began in the 1980s when David and Eleanor Stanwood adapted industrial felting techniques to create handmade art by stabbing a single felting needle into a ball of wool fiber.
Natural fibers such as wool, alpaca, and human hair are covered with scales that point from the root to the tip of the fiber. The scales’ structure, dimension, and thickness affect how the fiber feels, looks, and behaves. The scales on wool fibers are naturally long, lending to its scratchy tendencies and enabling it to fuse easily when agitated.
Needle felting involves using specialized needles with downward-facing barbs that grab and push fibers together, causing their scales to tangle and interlock into a matted material known as felt.
Needle felting 2D landscapes are paintings using layers of colored fiber applied with specialty needles instead of paint and brushes. In addition to wool, many other types of natural and synthetic fibers can be incorporated, such as cotton, silk, and viscose. Pre-dyed colors, different backing materials, needle types, and techniques can be combined to create unique visual textures and depths.
