Over 10 years into needle felting and there are always new techniques and skills to learn. Feeling my creativity RE-charged after Covid downtime, and by the recent Tapir & Baby Fairy project, I was inspired to tackle techniques I had procrastinated about for ages.

First up: HUMAN FACES. I had avoided them for years. Maybe it’s silly, but they intimidated me, and anyway, I was always having fun with anthropomorphic animal sculptures. Take a peek at the FOX, the OTTER, and the JACOB sheep. Animal faces are so readily identifiable they are very forgiving about proportions. However, human faces require more attention to detail and dimensions.

Psyching myself up to try a sculpture with a human FACE, and simultaneously learn to make thin, silk fiber WINGS, it was obvious I’d be making a large fairy person. I wise-cracked to my husband “She can’t be predictably tiny and delicate. Let her be unusual…say, a plump, elderly fairy. I can make that work.”

IF she was a fairy…then she could have magical companions! Ooh now there would be extra figures! How many? What shapes? What magical aspects to their bodies? How to pose them all together? Lots to figure out within 6 weeks until State Fair time, so I made a daily list to keep track of next steps needed.

Diving right into practice, I rapidly learned it’s best to work on human heads as if they were woolly lollipops on a wire stick. Initially I tried shaping the head while attached to body, then had to decapitate her because it was too hard rotating the whole body while tackling details of her face.

Check out the practice heads below. What works, and what doesn’t? What I perceive as flaws, are nose too big / forehead too short / eye ridge too huge / skull too small / lips too thin / or cheeks too big. Yeah, I had all those concerns. But I kept at it, being too entranced by what I saw was recognizably human faces, albeit needing improvement. What WAS the secret? Apparently, success is found in the right proportions. If an artist DRAWS faces, there are actual rule guidelines for proportions. And, it seems to apply the same for needle felting faces in wool. Once I concentrated on proportion guidelines, I made better progress.

2nd new skill: SILK FUSION. Simultaneously, I set about learning “SILK FUSION,” which is making a sheet-thin-as-paper by laying SILK FIBER between screens, and applying a stiffener liquid. There are many tutorials online. My plan was to use the silk fiber sheets for wings. All sort of fun possibilities tickled my imagination. There followed days of experimentation with 9 different stiffeners: glues, acrylic finishes, textile mediums… and tested various netting / screens / and plastic wrap. See? Creativity requires investigation, trial and error while learning new skills. All that effort consumes the hours. When I said “Oh, it took 6 weeks to create the fairy sculpture,” I was including the days of testing and learning – all under a time constraint. What possessed me to do that? Honestly, after such long Covid isolation, I feel the need to hurry up just about anything and everything.

3rd new skill: LEARNING TO MAKE HUMAN HANDS with thin wire and wrapped wool. I’d made innumerable animal paws, hooves and claws, but never human hands – with their different length fingers, thumb and knuckles. Hands are quite tricky! Proportion was important again, to size the hands correctly with the body. So multiple hand sets made over more days of exploration.

Around this time I tripped off our back steps onto rocks, sprained my left wrist, and bashed my right thumb palm (?) It was brutal. Forced time for healing meant days of inactivity with left wrist in a brace, and right hand in & out of ice baths. Days later, my bruised palm was still puffy; purple and green, with limited flexibility. Nevertheless, I worked on, making adjustments because my hands were too sore to firmly anchor wings with wire. Instead I sewed them on with gold thread. Ya do what’choo gotta do.

Being unaccustomed with creating a human head and body, I was sort of all-over-the-place in steps of construction. However, I took notes so the next time a sculpture can progress in a more sensible fashion. Less backing up to make adjustments and corrections.

While the tall creature clearly resembles some type of antelope in form, she has her own unique features; exaggerated tall, slender legs / an elongated neck / long, flexible tail / metallic gold hooves and horns / a coat of caramel shading to purplish-brown, embellished with snowy white stripes.

The two creatures above were such fun to make. Explorative creation means you don’t always need a specific plan beyond “this tall deer-like critter needs a RIDER.” What shape? What color? What features? How to position it? Saddle or not? And, where will Maisie’s hand rest? The main point is to move forward. Often, I’ll barely needle-poke wool to form a squishy shape of what I’m imagining – see the white thing in her hand. A mockup quickly informs whether a size & shape will work before investing hours of labor.

Because Maisie already had wings, and curiosity would have folk looking at her back side, I added a little creature clinging to the back of her skirt.

“Maisie’s Menagerie” went to 2023 Oregon State Fair in August, and – since I was present as a volunteer demonstrator for the craft of needle felting, I was able to have many lovely conversations about Maisie with fair visitors. Some people had never seen needle felting in action, and were curious: how is the wool held together by using those barbed needles and what could be built this way?

While demonstrating at the fair, I would ask someone to pull apart loose wool, then I’d take that same wool and needle felt it with many pokes – – hand it back to them and say “Now see how well the wool clings together.” Always the surprised faces when they could not pull it apart again, and “WOW! it’s really strong!” comments followed. I’d show basic shapes and what could be built from them…eventually gesturing to to Maisie, explaining how I could make small items, or keep adding wool layers to build quite a large sculpture.  Just….SO many possibilities…