Ready to clear

As a craft, needle felting is wonderfully compact . . . and it can still eat your life.

All it really needs is some unspun wool, a barbed needle about 3.5 inches long, and a piece of foam thick enough to keep the needle from hitting the work table. Except for the wax pot and the random fluff stash, my main work station fits into two big baskets that nest together so I can pick them up by one hand. Spread out, it takes up most of the dining room table. (The fellow in progress on the felting pad is the Lion.) For more on the construction process, take a look at Making Murphy, Building the Lindsay Raccoon, Birth of a Dragon, and New Ivory-billed Woodpecker for step-by-step series of pictures that take you from armature to portrait.

Work in progress

But it doesn’t need to be nearly that big. Below and to the left is my portable felting bench — a 12"x7"x5" shoe tote, fitted out with all the essential tools and a month’s supply of wool (or more). The pic shows the kit in action on the San Joaquin — the train between Oakland Jack London Square and Bakersfield (en route farther south) — in late November 2010, with the Ground Squirrel (another shoulder-riding pet) in the early stages of construction. It’s much more efficient now that I’ve figured out how to work without unpacking the cushion; just open up, lift out the two big packs of neutral-color wool, and fold down the sides! The little black box on a string is a digital keychain: the ultimate baby-picture carrier, with a slide show of the Salamander’s creatures for people who stop to chat.

Felting as the miles roll by....

On the other hand, wool calls to wool. I’ve bought a couple of pounds myself — a pound being a lot of wool, two cubic feet or more if not squished down — but far more has come trotting up and presented itself to me. In the back room, I now have three large tubs of the glorious stuff!

Perhaps I'll have to take up
wool dyeing after all.

The biggest of the tubs — a 25-gallon cube — is almost full of uncombed Romney fleeces that I collected from the ground where the sheep had been sheared, then washed for myself. That’s the last batch, another 2-gallon ziplock bag’s worth, drying in the foreground; it was later forced into the tub with the rest.