Needle felting is, to put it succinctly, “stabbing fluff until it’s cute”.
Wool as a fiber is easy to felt — basically, transform it into a solid mass. Heat, water, and friction can felt wool; it is easy to do by accident, if you throw a wool sweater in a washing machine (especially if the yarn isn’t specifically prepared to be machine-washable). You can also felt wool by using one or more needles, stabbing the fibers to entangle them with one another until it goes from being fluffy and squishy to solid. You can combine wet felting and needle felting in a single project, using water and agitation to felt the structure of a hat, and needle felting to decorate the hat.
Supplies
You can find a basic starter kit for around $20.
- Felting needles: there are different shapes and gauges (smaller numbers indicate larger needles; finer needles are used for higher-detail work); this video walks through the options
- Felting needle holders: some hold one needle safely, others can hold 3 or more to felt a larger area at the same time.
- Finger protectors: actually seriously important, always use this
- A felting pad: you need a surface you can safely stab to put under the wool
- Wool roving: the material you use for needle felting.
Resources & Tutorials
- The Felt Hub YouTube channel - includes specific project tutorials, along with getting started with needle felting for complete beginners
- Living Felt - extensive catalog of supplies as well as tutorials
- Fit to Be Loved - tutorials and guides specifically for needle-felting animals
Needle Felting & Data
Needle felting is similar to drawing or sculpture. You need to use wool for it to felt, so you can’t use fiber as a set of parameters for data visualization. Because you compact the fibers so much, you lose much distinction between different types of wool, so that’s not a good parameter, either.
By and large, you’re working with the same parameters as drawing: shape, color, and size. For your creation to hold together, it does need to be fairly well felted, but if you gain good control of the technique, you might be able to use squishiness as a property that you can map to data.