Beyond Beginners Felting: Needle Felted Sheep with Armature - April 5, 2025
April 5, 2025
1:00pm - 4:30pm
Needle felting is a magical and addicting art form that allows for lots of creativity! One technique that will help you progress in your needle felting is working with wire armature. A wire armature acts like a skeleton made of wire that you felt around. This can help to define your shapes as well as stabilize your felted creations. For those times when some additional structure is needed, using wire armatures can be very effective. Starting with partial armatures can help ease you into using wire in needle felting. It reduces the complexity and keeps your project manageable, while still allowing you to add detailed features and stability where needed.
Join me for this *beyond beginners* needle felting class where I teach you how to work with wire armature. In this 3.5 hour class, you’ll learn how to make a sheep with a premade partial wire armature. Skills taught in this class include how to wrap core wool around wire armature. How to carefully needle felt next to the wire to avoid breaking needles, and which needles to use when. How to use core wool to create the shapes and construct the sheep. How to create the wooly fleece of a sheep using a technique I developed using wool yarn. How to work with glass eyes. How to work with felt sheets. How to add embellishments to the design. This class is best suited to people that have had some prior basic needle felting experience.
Each class participant will make one sheep in class, and go home with a felting needle for any additional poking. They will also receive a paper copy of the template for the partial wire armature used in constructing the sheep, as well as wire recommendations and a list of the tools I used to make the armature.
*For my sheep, I chose wool yarn is a soft sea-foam green. If participants prefer another color, I’ll have some wool yarn in several natural colors as well. If a participant has some of their own wool yarn they want to learn how to use, they can bring that and I can teach them the technique.
Tuition: $50
Materials: $15
This course is for adults 18+, or students 14+ with accompanying adult
Your Instructor
KAREN STORKAMP
(she/her)
Learn the magic of transforming wool into 2 and 3 D objects from an experienced needle felting artist. Karen has been an avid needle filter since 2016. She finds working with wool to be a very tactile and sensory experience, and the process of felting wool is all hands on. Besides the texture of wool under her fingers, she also finds the repeated rhythmic motion of interlocking fibers extremely soothing. In her years of learning, teaching, and experiencing, Karen has come up with lots of tips and tricks, from what kind of supplies to buy, to how to create one of a kind pieces of art. Karen hopes her work will inspire people to look for new ways to create, and hopefully also experience the soul soothing calmness that comes form working in this art medium. If you’d like to know more about Karen’s work, you can find her on Facebook as ‘I Felt It’.