October creative workshop: needle-felted pumpkins

 The photo above is of a few tiny pumpkins I have stored in my seasonal table box.  Forms and detail variations are endless, as is the variation in size.  For more possibilities, I'd suggest a search on etsy.com:  needle felted pumpkin.  Let it spark your imagination (or are you already sold?)...and then register to join us.  Registration details on the side bar.  Questions? thewondercollective@gmail.com

We try to introduce a new skill or medium at our creative workshops, something you can return to again and use to enhance your own future creative endeavors, rather than having an assembly-line experience.  The biggest game changer in my own creative life in the last decade has been working with felted wool, and I'm excited to share my favorite, needle-felting, with you!

Our first Thursday night workshop:  October 18th, 7-9 pm, at The Thought Lot, 37 E. Garfield.  $15 includes all the supplies you will need, plus an extra bit to take home and experiment with, all tucked in this sweet felt basket.  
The needle felting technique uses a special barbed needle to make sculptures with wool.  A bright fluff of soft mohair, its microscopic scales caught by the barbs,

can be condensed and shaped into remarkably firm little three-dimensional figure.Needle felting is also used in a more two-dimensional way, as a sort of embroidery, but for this workshop we will focus on its sculptural applications.  I first saw needle felted forms in a newspaper story for a fall festival I attended at a Waldorf school in Nashville, TN.  One of the parents at the school had made a set of characters from A Wind in the Willows to be auctioned off.  I had never seen anything like that before!  Made by a parent, not a professional artisan!  I bribed my daughter to go into the children's-only Angels Gift Room and buy me a small needle felted angel that still sits atop my printer's drawer-turned-miniature shelf.  I bought one felting needle and a baggie with four colors of wool, and my love affair with felting began.  It was early in the days of crafting tutorials online, and I searched for hours with my dial-up connection for a thorough tutorial.  I never really found anything, and this is why:  you just poke.  Well, there are a few tricks...I'll save those for the workshop.

In the meantime, I'm ordering new needles, and dyeing wool in preparation.  For starters, I have an 11:00 date this morning with a friend to ride bikes to a field of goldenrod, which yields a bright chartreuse....