Needle felting workshops - Book Review

  

The first book I'd like to review for you is 'Needle Felting Workshops with Jenny Barnett'.  I believe this is a self published book so isn't available at places like Amazon at the moment, but can be bought here:

Needle Felting Workshops with Jenny Barnett

I picked this up from Jenny's stall at the Yarndale show last October in Skipton.  As soon as I saw the book and examples of Jenny's work, I knew I had to buy it, as the sweet style of the animals in it were completely different to any I had seen in a book before.

The book starts by covering the basics of how to needle felt and how to make and work with the basic elements that each of the creations will be made of - bodys, attaching limbs, details such as eyes and whiskers.  It's all done in a pretty, almost scrapbook style, with a combination of text, helpful photos and sketches to illustrate the techniques. There is also an interesting section on posing your animal as one of the things that is different with this book to others I have is that it encourages you to try different poses with each of the animals to give them different characters, rather than just recreating one example exactly.

After these general explanations, there are then 10 workshops, each making a different animal.  I think a key part of reviewing a craft book is to actually try making some items from it and seeing how they come out, so I have made 4 of the animals so far, and I took a few photos whilst I was making the most recent one - a grey seal.

All of the workshops follow pretty much the same format.  First you weigh out your fleece so you know from the start you are using the right amount.  Then you felt each of the separate pieces for the body and the head.  Split in this way, they are quite simple shapes and there's a full scale drawing of each shape you are aiming for, so it's quite easy to get the proportions right.  It gets a little trickier when you come to attach the head as you need decide on the pose you are going to use and then spend a little time attaching it in this pose and building up the neck by eye, which takes a bit of patience - as you can see above it was looking a little skinny to start with!  There are lots of photos of each of the finished animals in all sorts of different poses in the book to give you ideas, so you can pick the one you like the most and copy it.

Next comes creating the limbs and there are more full scale drawings to compare the shape of each of these.  Then you need to decide where these need to be attached to achieve the pose you are after - again there's plenty of example photos to help here.  Within each of the workshops, there aren't step by step photos for putting together each animal, but they do contain clear, descriptive instructions taking you through each stage.  You can also refer back to the start of book were there are step by step photos for attaching the legs and how to add the facial details etc.  This seems fine to me, as there would just be a lot of repetition in each workshop if the steps were included each time since the techniques are the same.

After adding all the details and small tweaks to the shape, I finally had a seal I was happy with:

And here are some photos of the other three animals I've made from this book:

I'm really pleased with this book and with what I've been able to create following the instructions within it.  These were the first pieces of needle felting I'd done that were proper looking animals rather than simplified ball-shaped creatures, yet I was surprised at how easy they were to achieve. I found that they do take a few hours each and I needed to be patient and keep persisting with adjusting the shape of a few things, but I think the results are worth it.

You can get a copy of the book and also kits for the creatures within it from http://www.coriandr.com/shop/jennymade