Needle Felted Flower Meadow.

All the mothers at K's Waldorf school are banding together to make her teacher a story blanket. A few of the mothers are seasoned knitter and they have made a plan of what the blanket will look like. They have given the rest of us a few squares to knit. They will put all of our squares together to make our highly anticipated story blanket. We had a brain wave and decided to make double of each square... make two blankets and auction the second one off at our school's May Fair! Oh Gosh... how I am going to want that second story blanket!

But, I am not proficient in knitting yet. I am still at the scarf level of knitting. And, I am very slow... knitting two squares would take me FOREVER, so, I have decided to make a flower meadow out of felting a thrifted sweater instead. I had a practice run and am happy to say that it looks lovely. K quickly claimed my trial run and has been playing with it all afternoon. Here it is, with silky the sheep playing happily amongst the pink flowers and Christmas Gnome merrily picking his love, Snowflake, a bunch of pink blooms. She loves it. There is even a little wooden toadstool growing in it!

I thought I'd share with you how I made it.

First of all, a couple of days ago, I felted a thrifted 100% wool sweater I found at Goodwill. It is a gorgeous green. All you need to do to felt a wool sweater, is run it through the HOT wash cycle of your machine a couple of times... the hot water will shrink the fibers, meshing them together and turning the wool into felt. Drying it in the dryer felts the sweater even more and you end up with a very shrunken, felted sweater. This is good, this is what you want. You know it is felted when you can no longer see the knitted stitches. The fibers have completely meshed, leaving solid felt.

I then cut a square from the sweater. It is now felt so does not unravel when cut. This is my meadow.

Then I made flowers from pink wool roving. 

To make a flower, I separate a little tuft of roving and roll it in my fingers to form a loose ball. I put the ball on the felting board and stab it in the center a couple of times until it is secured to the board. I then gather the loose strands on the outside of the small ball with my needle and bring them into the center of the ball, stabbing them in. I continue this all around the ball until it takes the shape of a sweet little flower. When my flower is done, I peel it off the board. The bottom end of my flower has a lovely 'beard' that is perfect for attaching to the felted meadow. You can see the beards in this photo, 

I take each flower and felt it into the felted sweater meadow using the flower's beard. I poke at the base of the beard until it is all poked through to the other side of the felt and is no longer visible. This secures my flower to the meadow.


I felted all the flowers into the meadow in the same way.

This is what the underside of the felted meadow piece looks like. All the flower beards have been needle felted through to the other side of the meadow, thus securing the flowers to the felt.
And, voila, you have a lovely, soft, green and pink flower meadow for your child to play with.

Of course, you can make any color flower you desire. K wanted pink and I do think it looks lovely. Tonight, I will finish the two flower meadows for the school story blanket and I am so happy with how K's meadow turned out, I think I'll stick to pink flowers too. I will be sure to post a picture of the story blanket when it is finished. I can hardly wait to see it!