How To Use Hand Carders For Needle Felting

Wool for needle felting is available in many lovely colours, but you don’t always have the exact colour you want in your stash, so use hand carders to blend your own!

Not only is this economical, but your needle felting will benefit from your own unique shades of colour.

You can card prepared fibres and you can turn yarn into feltable fibre.   

  

Above: Merino Wool Top/Roving, Tapestry Wool and 100% wool knitting yarn

As an example, to blend a colour that could be called ‘heather’, pull off tufts of purple and pink merino wool top/roving and lay them on one carder as shown.  Don’t overload the carder – it will make it difficult to blend.

      

Hold the loaded carder in your left hand then pull the other carder gently across the left hand carder until the fibres separate between the carders – begin by pulling across only the lower part of the carder then progress to the whole of it.  Do this 3 or 4 times.

Don’t push the carders together forcefully or the carders might ruin as the teeth of one could cut into the cloth of the other.
  
    

You now need to get all the fibre back onto the left hand carder.  Hold the carders face up and with the bottom edges together.  Use small upward right/left/right/left flicking actions –

    

the fibres will come away from the carders. 
 

Replace the fibres on the left hand carder and repeat the carding process….

….until you are happy with the blend. 

Tip: Even at this stage you can change the shade by re-carding and blending in another colour.

This is the lovely ‘heather’ colour produced from purple and pink.