Needle felting with kids

Yesterday on our way home from the park I picked up a few craft supplies. One of the things I got was a few needles for felting wool. This is something I've always wanted to try, but for some reason until today I never have. I sat at our table in the evening and played a bit with roving and one of the needles just trying to get a feel for what I was doing and how it worked.  (Wool roving is a piece of wool which has been combed, drawn into a clump, and then twisted slightly to hold the fibers together and to prepare them for spinning or in our case felting!)

Matthew stood there watching me transfixed. He wanted to know what types of things could be created by doing needlefelting, so I looked up a few pictues on the internet to show him the endless possibilities. (a beautiful blog full of lovely original art works is Softearths World) He asked me if he could try needle felting something.

I gave him his choice of roving colors and a needle (with warnings about extreme sharpness!) And let him felt to his hearts content. The first thing he made was a heart with a little arrow in it.

This morning as soon as we had eaten our breakfast he asked if he could make a Little Red Riding Hood.

Ummm... sure! I haven't even attempted anything this ambitious yet! But I wasn't about to stifle his creative urges! I adore how confident and innocent he is. No-one has ever told him he can't draw well, or that he can't paint well, or sculpt well or given him any sort of negative critisism so he is utterly confident that he can do whatever he sets out to do! So off he went to make Little Red Riding Hood.