Don’t we all wish we could be children sometimes? The freedom to be creative, taking inspiration from anything we see. Maybe that’s what is so appealing with an art such as wet felting. It gives us all the opportunity to create!
Alex and I were talking about nature, and reflecting on a project we did in the summer when we turned golf balls into ladybirds (or ladybugs as you may call them). It was then that I got thinking about how many children love ladybirds! We had been thinking about our next felting project and we thought it would be fun to incorporate ladybirds into the mix! Felted soaps are really easy for children to make, there are so many different ways you can be creative. So – we thought about combining felted soaps with our favourite little creatures….ladybirds!
In order to prepare the soap, I trimmed the hard edges using a potato peeler. I find these really good for this job, as you can cut a thin slither of soap without digging into it too much. We like to collect the soap chippings, which we then add to our bowl of hot water. We use this for the felting, and the scented water adds to the scent of the felted soap.
We chose to use wool batt to make our felted ladybirds as we already had this at home. I would also like to try making them with Merino wool, to see if they come out softer. We used 3oz of red wool first, which we wrapped around the soap to make the ladybird’s body. The black wool was put aside for later, when we came to needle felt the spots!
Once we had wrapped the soap in the red wool, we put it inside a cut off pair of tights to keep the wool in place when we started to felt it. You might notice our two soaps are different sizes. That’s because one contains a baby soap, which although it was the same make as the larger soap, it was slightly smaller.
And then the fun starts! We begin wet felting our soaps.
You can see by Alex’s face, he really enjoys this activity! The only thing I had to watch is that he got a little overzealous and I had to watch we didn’t end up with a squished ladybird!!
We felted away for about 10 or 15 minutes. After a while, we removed the tights and felted direct with our hands. We also tried using some mesh and also some bubble wrap to help things along.
After the soaps had dried, we needed to add the spots and faces. We used the black wool batt for this. We think they came out pretty well!
For time constraints, we only managed to decorate two ladybirds in time for the blog. But we are looking forward to making some more. We also plan to make lots of other soaps, both for adults and children. They make lovely gifts for friends and family!!
