Red Felt Ornament

Here's another felt ornament made for a swap-bot swap. This one was for a heart ornament and it was a good excuse to use up some of the large red piece of wool cloth I had hot washed and felted. I tossed up ideas on how I should go about decorating it and settled on a little bit of needle felting. I had some scraps of left over ecru wool yarn from knitting up a Sophie bag like this black one and this white one, and I laid the yarn down and started to poke it it with the felting needle a few millimeters at a time. It is very simple as all you need to do is poke straight down through the felt over and over until the yarn because felted into the red background. You could easily write letters to personalize an ornament in the very same way. All you need is some felted wool fabric, some wool yarn scraps, a felting needle, and a piece of high density foam to put underneath your project. You could trace a pattern in chalk or fabric marker to outline your pattern first, but I chose to just do it freehand since my design was quite simple. You can work the design in with lots of poking with the felting needle which will flatten out the overlaid yarn, or you can poke it just enough to secure it, leaving the yarn raised above the felt fabric. I like to work the yarn in with the felting needle in enough so that traces of the yarn being felted starts to show through on the back of the fabric. After felting the front piece, I cut a second piece for the back, sandwiched a loop of ribbon into the top and blanket stitched all around to close and piece and to fasted the ribbon loop. I chose to use 3 stands of red embroidery floss to use for blanket stitching, but an ecru colour might also have be nice. This is another quicky project which took me less than a half hour to complete, and that included coming up with a design.