This week’s Unplugged Challenge theme Fluffy inspired us to do two different crafts. Here is the first one… Wet Felted Wool Gingerbread Men Ornaments. I will be sharing the second activity later this week.
We started by digging through some of Gammy’s large bags of Wool Roving. We then tracked down some gingerbread men cookie cutters, flat bottom containers and a poky object (wooden kitchen skewers in our case… knitting needles, chop sticks, etc would work).
We placed the cookie cutter in the bottom of the container. Then we pulled off small bits of the wool roving and filled in the cookie cutter. Try not to let any of the wool escapse under the edge of the cutter. Be sure to get in all the corners.
Once the cookie cutter was full to the top edge with wool, we add very warm water to the container and dish soap.
Then we needed to agitate the wool for several minutes. This is where the poky object came in to play. Be sure to poke straight up and down.
The younger two seemed to want to STIR the wool rather than using a straight up and down motion. So I ended up just having them use their fingers to poke the wool. That seemed to work just fine.
It does take several minutes of constant agitation to set up. Once they were set, we rinse them, patted them dry on a towel and then I set them over a vent to dry. When they were dry I added a simple piece of embroidery floss for hanging.
You could definitely embellish these ornaments if you would like. Try blanket stitching the edge, adding buttons, embroidery, glitter, etc. You could add a wool design on the front before felting if you wanted. We decided to just keep ours simple this time around but I can imagine making a bunch of these next year and stringing them together to make a cute garland.
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Definitely a good interpretation of “fluffy”! We did this same activity on Thursday as our Advent calendar activity of the day. I’m not sure what we did wrong since I felt all the time, but they didn’t set up very well with just J doing the finger smooshing. We also tried using chopsticks but that didn’t help either. I ended up letting it dry, needle felting it inside the cookie cutter to mesh the fibers together better, and then I blanket-stitched around. He also picked a snowman cookie cutter which was probably part of the problem. A bit too many nooks and crannies. Your gingerbread people came out great. Even though it didn’t come out perfectly, J was still very excited to hang it on our tree today!
Tina, that is fun that you guys did this project this week too. One of our three didn’t set up as well as the other two. Slightly different roving I think. It was chunkier… shorter strands if that makes sense. Anyway Fairy’s (the dark blue) is a bit wonkier than the others. I ended up having to finish it up… although I still did it wet. I flipped it over (while still inside the cookie cutter) to agitate it from the backside which helped.
I love allthese felted activities I see on the net.. maybe it is just me, but I find it hard to find roving.. maybe felting isnt as popular in Australia.. but these gingerbread men are adorable
That’s a good idea to agitate it from the back as well. I’ll have to try that if we do it again. K wasn’t interested in doing it when we did it last week. Part of the problem was also probably because of the roving, as you mentioned. I used shorter fiber roving which doesn’t always wet felt as well. So maybe next time, we’ll do the longer fiber roving, and I’ll try flipping them over halfway. Thanks for the tips! They do make cute ornaments.
This is a project I’ve been really wanting to try for awhile. Yours turned out great!
so cute!
Those are lovely! I have yet to try anything with felting. This looks like an easy first project. Perhaps we will try to make some of these as we will be home for Christmas this year. It looks like fun for younger children too.