Sheep to Toy Conversion

One day I would like to live in the middle of nowhere and grow my own food and try to be self sustainable.   This may just be a wild eyed dream, but I was wondering if my craft would be sustainable at that point.  If I had one sheep, what kind of felting projects could I pull off?

I harvested these from my garden a few days ago.

So, I did a little research on sheep shearing.  Turns out there are two kinds of sheep one raised for its fleece and one raised for its meat.  I am going to be talking about the former.  A sheep is sheared annually at springtime.  This relieves them from the heat and from the weight of their heavy coat; it also helps prevent infections from anything that would take up home in their matted wool.  One sheep can produce 2 to 30 lbs. of wool a year.  This changes upon breed.  For my experiment, I choose to use the average amount a sheep produces annually in the U.S. which is around 7 lbs. a year.

The Sheep weighed in the heaviest at 0.8 ounces.

After researching this I weighed each one of my needle felted creatures(at least the ones still in my possession),  altogether they weighed 7.3 ounces.  There are currently 17 of them, so that is an average of 0.4 ounces each.  So if one sheep produces around 7 lbs each year, then each year I could make 280 felt figurines.  That is a lot of felted cuteness.

I filled the bowl to the brim!

“Well why is this important to me?”, you ask.  Well if you are also practicing needle felting or wet felting it would be interesting to know how many items you can make whether you order your wool online or shear it from your own sheep.  Mine are very small creations, around 3 to 7 inches.  So this average only works for me.  But the math is easy and if you order say 5 lbs of wool, you can easily calculate how long that stash will last.  I was running out of wool(I had previously ordered a couple lbs) and I was curious how many more projects I could make from my stash.

Now get to calculating.  I was very surprised at how many toys I could make by just raising one sheep.  I could make 280 kids very happy, not to mention how happy that would make me!  Happy felting!

Wool Dryer Balls?

A couple of posts ago, I mentioned that I had made some felt balls by wet felting them in the washing machine.  While researching for that project, I came across something called wool dryer balls.  I was so intrigued that I decided to do a little experiment.

First, I would like to tell the reported benefits of wool dryer balls.  The idea is that you throw a few felted balls into your dryer when drying a load of laundry.  The touted benefits are up to 40% shorter drying time(saving you money on that energy bill), and less wrinkles.  This is supposed to be a green, ecofriendly way of replacing dryer sheets and fabric softeners, because it is reusable and natural.  You can even drop a bit of smelly essential oils onto the wool balls if you want your clothes to come out smelling fantastic.

I was so totally drawn in by the listed benefits that I decided to do a science experiment.  It reminded me of my school days; coming up with variables and constants.  I decided to try it out with cloth diapers.  Wool balls are safe to use with cloth diapers, while dryer sheets and fabric softeners mess with their absorbency.  Also, my diapers take forever to dry.  So the set up was 15 cloth diapers a load; that was the constant.  The variable was the felt balls.  The first load without the balls took 100 minutes.  Now you can see why I chose diapers to test this with.  My dryer only goes up to 80 minutes and then I have to reset it.  The idea of saving money by less drying time was so tempting.  Now on to the second load,  15 diapers and 4 felted balls.  I was excited and checking every 20 minutes or so, “Are they ready now?”, “now?”.  The second load was finally dry!  But, alas, it took 100 minutes.  It was a failure.

I was so disappointed, I truly wanted it to work.  The idea is sound.  The wool balls absorb some water from the wet clothes and agitate them so more hot air circulates through them.  I had heard tennis balls and simply a dry towel have similar effects.  Are all of these suggestions wives’ tales or am I doing it wrong?  The tests are not over yet, a hundred wives can’t be wrong!  I will try again with more balls and perhaps something besides diapers.  They are a beast to dry to begin with.

A Handmade Baby

Okay so the baby is not handmade, but she’s surrounded by handmade goodies.  Today I put her on her blanket, supplied her with a few crochet and knit balls and walked away for a moment.  This is the little monkey before I left.  Adorable right?  Very involved with her balls, not even caring that I’m walking away . . .

Yet, when I came back she looked something like this.  Surrounded by toys once more, but wait . . . not the toys I had left her with!  You can tell by her squirminess and thumb sucking that she has been caught.

That’s right red-handed with all MY felt toys.  But look,  the girl can pick up and well!  All of this cleaning was without my prompt, she just grabbed the container and went to town.  I think half the fun of playing with small figurine size toys is the fact that you can take them out of bins, bowls, shopping carts and then put them back.

And she’s finished.  TA-DAA!  I was actually very happy she broke into my container of felt toys. I couldn’t keep the smile off of my face.   They are meant to be played with and while these are for future sells,  they were probably getting lonely.  The giraffe, bumblebee, deer, elephant, dinosaurs, and penguin probably had the time of their life.  And let’s not forget the gnome.  I’m sure they really appreciated a test run!

Ouch . . . It Stung Me!

A few days ago, my husband and I made three felt balls by wet felting with our laundry.  I have loads to say about that but I’ll save it for later.  However, I ended up with three balls that were pretty dense.  I couldn’t sculpt such dense balls, but at least I could needle felt some decorations on them.  My first thought was a round bumblebee.  And as you can see the results were great.  I love the color contrast of the black and yellow and I could really see a baby twiddling the wings between its fingers(you know the way babies love tags!)

Now I have two more balls to decorate.  I love animals so I naturally think maybe an owl, a penquin, a baby chick, or just a face of any animal like a monkey.

All of these ideas are tempting me to make more felt balls.  I will let you see what these two temporarily white balls end up looking like in future posts.