Best Crafts Easy For Kids
  Needle Felted Animals

It's fun making crafts easy for kids! Your kids will love making needle felted animals because they look really cute and - if they want to - your kids can spread happiness by leaving hand-made toys for other children to find.

Our easy needle felting tutorial shows you how to make simple homeschool felted birds and animals which look really nice and don't need lots of stuff to make.

As you can see, they had so much homeschooling fun making cute birds we ended up with a whole flock of them!

I'll show you how we made them and later my daughter Catherine will show you some more complicated animals once your kids have got the hang of felting.

Needle Felting Instructions For Kids

Age

This is one of those homeschool crafts easy for kids which you need to use your own discretion as to how young you can start.

Felting needles are really long and sharp.

If you supervise and make sure your child takes care, I can see you being able to make this a fun crafts activity for kids over the age of 5.

It's the needle that's the danger, and it is rather vicious.

Homeschool Felting Materials

1. Roving wool - easy to order on the internet*
2. Foam pad (ours was just one that we got from some packaging)
3. Needle felting needles
4. A small amount of felt for wings, eyes, beaks and feet
5. I would not buy a needle felting tool, whatever the instructions say! One needle on its own is much more easy for kids to manage.
   

*In case I'm not the only one who didn't know, (thanks Rachel!), roving wool is the wool combed out of the fleece and carded to pull the fibers so they are oriented in the same direction. It comes in lots of pretty colors.

Needle Felting Tutorial

I told you this was an example of homeschooling fun crafts easy for kids didn't I?

The foam is just there for something easy to work on which you can jab your needle into.

Needle Felted Bird Tutorial

• Get your kids to make two balls out of the roving wool, one big one for the body and a smaller one for the head.
• Place one of the balls on the foam and pierce through it. The more you jab your needle up and down, the tighter woven the ball will be.
  
• Do the same with the other ball.
  
• Fix the head and the body together by jabbing up and down with the needle again.

• Your kids need to cut out some simple felt shapes to make beaks, wings, eyes and feet (or you can make it easy by cutting them out yourself).
  
• Attach the felt shapes to the body parts by placing them on top and pushing the needle up and down through them and the wool beneath.

That's pretty much all there is to it.

Once you've made birds, it's fairly easy for your kids to adapt the bird instructions to make other fun animals.

Here's a fluffy homeschool cat Catherine's made - though I guess the birds wouldn't be too keen!

More Fun Crafts For Kids With Homeschool Needle Felting

Needle Felted Brooches

• I have seen felting used very effectively to make brooches.

I have to say we haven't tried ourselves, and I don't think it makes homeschooling crafts easy for kids - it really needs a bit more skill.

However, the instructions say all you need do is to use a thick piece of felt, cut it into a brooch/badge shape and place small pieces of roving wool on top. Then you jab your needle up and down to attach the colors to the felt and use a safety pin through the back of the felt to attach the brooch.

You can do the same thing to make landscapes or homeschooling felt pictures, using thick black felt as the backdrop.

Needle Felt Animals

Here are some lovely needle felted creations made by Lillian to prove how much fun kids can have with needle felt crafts.

Easy Kids Crafts As Homeschooling Presents

One of the lovely things to come out of this kids crafts activity was that William and Catherine decided to use their needle felting skills to make fun homeschool presents for other children.

Give A Gift

William and Catherine were captivated by this homeschooling idea. We left their homeschool felted animals for other children to find in our local park.

It was very exciting waiting to see if anyone would say they had picked up our toys!

What a lovely way to round off your felting crafts project.

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