How-To: Making a Needlefelted Turkey

daniellexo

Story by daniellexo

Published on Nov 04, 2008 in Make

Photo by winsomehollow & littleloveblue

I was recently shopping local and bumped into two great Etsy shops for heartfelt and natural kids toys, winsomehollow & littleloveblue.  Turns out these Etsy sellers are sisters! I invited them down to the Etsy Labs to do a live how-to in the Virtual Labs and luckily, they were thrilled to share with the rest of Etsy.  Here’s a gorgeous photo tutorial they put together for those who can’t make it November 6th, Thursday at 7pm EST.  (Note: After the how-to we’ll be showing our favorite kid’s toys on Etsy. So come on by and get some holiday shopping done! For a good starting point, check out our Top 10 Waldorf Toys.)

 

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Materials:

Here are the basic steps for the turkey:
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Pull off a large handful of wool stuffing, spreading the wool into a long piece. Roll the wool tightly into a ball shape. This will be the basic size of the turkey’s body.  You can add or remove wool to change the size.

 

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Using the foam felting surface, place your wool ball on the foam and begin poking the ball (and poking and poking!) all around and through to the center with the felting needle. Do this until the wool is relatively firm and equally dense around. 
Tip:  Try to poke the needle at a straight angle, so as not to bend or break the needle!

 

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Pull of some small pieces of brown roving (your base color for your turkey) and spread thin layers around the ball, again using your felting needle to poke and attach the color to the ball.
Tip:  After applying the color, gently roll the ball around in your hands to smooth the wool surface.

 

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Continue to poke what will be the bottom of your turkey’s body, until the bottom is a flat surface. This will make the turkey stand upright.

 

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To make the head, roll and felt another smaller wool ball (this is for the turkey’s head). This time leaving a section at the end unrolled for the turkey’s neck.  Roll and poke this unrolled section until firm and shaped like a neck.  Cover the head in brown roving as well.The turkey’s head can either be sewn with brown thread onto the front of the larger ball (more firmly attached), or needle felted onto the front of the larger ball.

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To create feathers, pull off small, thin strips of various colors of wool roving, and smooth into long fluffy pieces.  Again using your felting needle, attach one end of these pieces of roving, in alternating colors, in a semicircle around the back of the larger ball, so that the pieces stand tall like turkey feathers.

 

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Roll a tiny piece of dark roving between your fingers for the turkey’s eye, poking this piece onto the face of the turkey with your needle. Repeat on the other side.  Remove another small section of roving for the turkey’s beak, felting one end of the piece onto the turkey’s face.
Tip:  Wet your fingers to smooth and shape the roving into the pointed shape of a beak.


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The basic wool ball can be made into any number of sweet little animals.  Add a round head, long ears and a small fluffy tail to make a bunny.  for a a hedgehog, elongate the head into a more pointed shape, (adding a cute little nose on the end and two ears on top!), and cover the body with a coarse fluffy brown roving.

Don’t forget: to see this how-to live, join us November 6th at 7pm EST in the Virtual Labs!

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