Sunday, August 31, 2008

Felting Beads

After purchasing and working with some textile beads, and after making my own paper mache beads, I really wanted to try making felted beads. I just love the texture and interest it adds. So I bought this carded wool batt from yummyyarn.I chose this seller because of her Canadian location, and because the colours of this wool was exactly what I was looking for. Perfect burgundies, pinks and grays for fall.

I found many different tutorials online for making beads. It sounded simple enough. Make a ball of wool, dip in soapy water, wring out excess water, roll between hands. The hard part is making uniform beads. If you put even the slightest pressure while rolling the ball of wool between your palms, you get creases in your beads. The problem for me was the getting rid of excess water part. As soon as I squeezed, the ball was no longer uniform and creases were immediately there, no matter how little pressure I rolled with...Here are my beads. You can't really see, but each bead has an ugly crease in it. Thankfully, I have quite a bit of wool left... more practice in store over here.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

That looks hard to do! You'll figure it out, or make something totally different and unique.

As a keeper of cats, it's really hard to think about your beads with a straight face. My husband will die when I tell him "You can sell those on ETSY!"