Would you like to learn how to hand blend wool?
In this tutorial I explain why hand blending wool is so effective when needle felting realistic animals and then I’ll show you how I do it.
It is perfect for long furred animals when you need to mix wool tops/roving colours together.
Read on or watch the video here 🙂
Why hand blend your wool?
When you closely study the lovely colours and textures of a real animal’s fur you’ll notice there are often many different tones rather than just one block colour. you’ll especially see this when looking at them in the natural daylight.
When replicating a fox I chose a variety of colours rather than just one or two to make the fur look as realistic as possible. I prepared my palette of wool colours much like a painter would prepare a palette of paints.
But how, then do I mix those colours together? …now that is where hand blending comes in…
You could use carding brushes or dog brushes to blend several colours of wool to get the tone you need …and that’s great especially for smaller animal creations or where the animal has shorter fur..
BUT with hand blending, though it can take a bit longer, I feel I have a bit more control over how much I blend the colours and it’s brilliant for long furred animals.
Hand blending enables you to keep your wool tops/roving fibres lined up all in the same direction with no matting!
Those luscious long lengths can then be added as long fur to your animal…
And if you want to you can easily still see individual strands of colour for a more natural textured look
So, how do I hand blend?
For long fur you’ll want to keep the fibres all going in one direction as much as possible. And then simply use your hands to blend the wool.
One easy way to achieve this is to stack lengths of each colour on top of each other…
and then hold one end of the wool firmly with one hand and then using your thumb and first finger of the other hand, carefully but firmly pull the wool away.
Lay each layer again on top of each other (fibres all in same direction) and keep going until all the wool is blended as much as you want it to be.
Make sure you split the piles of wool up into smaller manageable sizes and not too much to blend in one go.
You can also split the piles lengthways if you see too much of any one colour.
I used hand blending for my sheltie dog…
Tabby Birman cat…(full series on needle felting a cat head is here)
Guinea pigs…
and donkeys….
Which felted animal are you going to use this hand blending technique on? Let me know in the comments.
If you need some tips on how to add long fur you might like these tutorials.
Fit to be loved 