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Needle felting newbie. Any tips or advice?
I just got into felting, and I have already made 3 siamese cat ball.. ornament... things. I plan to sell these on Etsy for some side income.
Does anyone have any good sources for wool, with a good selection of colors (preferably earth tones)?
What about tips in felting strategies for things like keeping lines neat, or blending colors together, fading them, general design layout planning, etc?
Pics of my first felt cat, the seal point: https://imgur.com/a/u6hJOgy
You can't go wrong with Living Felt for a source of quality wool. I also use an Etsy shop I really like, but they're taking a break for the holidays right now and the page is inactive. For keeping lines straight, my advice is that you can attach felt sheets to your felt creations just the same as wool. So you could draw whatever shape you like on felt, cut it out, and then felt it into your creations. Just make sure it's the softer kind of felt because the hard kind could put too much stress on your needles.
I'm actually working on a needlefelting course, to sell for side income of my own, though that's on pause for the holidays. I have a pretty unique method! If it's allowed to be posted around here, I will at some point, so feel free to keep a look out!
It's adorable!! Reminds me of Animal Orbs from Castle Crashers.
I never got into this craft myself because of the cost. Raw crafting materials are far cheaper closer to where they're manufactured: India China etc. if you end up using a certain four letter Chinese app, make sure it's a toss away credit card number on a phone you don't have private data on. Info The other places I see that have good selections on colours are those independent yarn / fibre arts stores that might even carry locally spun stuff. But I would imagine they're $$$$.
Thank you! I'd never heard of castle crashers before.
I use Amazon for most everything. Selling these on Etsy though, some of the reputable sellers can have them go for around $30. I plan to probably keep the price low at first but raise it once I get a good reputation. Probably start off at $10, slowly raise to around $25 over the course of a year. This is all before I calculate the shipping and fees.
And this doesn't include the hot glue gun I clearly need. I nearly superglued my fingers together yesterday. Lol. Olive oil helped to get it all off though.
All in all, I spent $8.59 on a one time purchase of the needles themselves, a very infrequent $12.99 for a pack of 600 eye pieces. And the most recurring items will be the 2.7 inch wool ball bases, which is $36.50 and the 1oz colors were $19.99 (but has a bunch of colors I wont use). I just ordered larger batches (this time from Etsy) of 4 oz each of the 10 specific colors I need as opposed to spending money on felt I won't use, and that was about $49. But each item is 4x more than what I got in the sampler pack from Amazon (and minus the waste colors), and I estimate I'm using half an ounce per cat. So in the end, it's cheaper.
I had to get chatgtp to help me calculate ༎ຶᴗ༎ຶ
Eye pieces cost:
Cost for 2 eyes = $12.99 / 600 * 2 = $0.0433 (approximately $0.04)
Felt cost:
Cost for half an ounce = $49 / 4 * 1/2 = $6.13
Cost per base felt ball:
Cost per base felt ball = $36.50 / 20 = $1.825
Total cost of materials per product:
Total cost = Eye pieces cost + Felt cost + Cost per base felt ball
Total cost = $0.04 + $6.13 + $1.825
Total cost ≈ $7.995 (or around $8)
So, $8 per cat to break even, if I buy the larger samples of 4oz felt colors from now on.
But this ofc is before shipping, fees, and labor costs. I chose to leave out the cost of the needles since they were a one time purchase.