People often ask how to really blend your fibres well before using them, or how to mix colours together to make your own blends.  This is where hand carders come in.

I’m a firm believer in mixing all your fibres before you use them for needle felting.  I know a number of videos out there show just rolling the fibre up or (gasp) making a knot in it to create a ball!  But for the last almost 20 years, I have always mixed my fibres by hand to get a medium that will felt together evenly and quickly.  If you think about it, what is needle felting?  It’s tangling fibers together and the most successful way to do that is to help it along right from the start, when you work with fibre that is all laying in one direction you will have a much harder time getting it firm, even and smooth.

The second reason to hand card is to blend colours.  So, especially if you have a limited range of colours, you can blend 2 or more together to get a new colour or mix of colours to create the look you are going for.  Using the carders you will find it super easy to evenly blend different colours together.  If you are needing quite a bit of fibre it can take a while as you can only fit so much on the brush but it’s definitely worth the effort and helps to make your creations so much more unique!

Whether you are needle or wet felting this is a technique that will be useful for all felters!

The tutorial today is just a little one but I wanted to draw your attention to what a useful tool this is, and you don’t need to even have ‘proper’ hand carders, as they are quite expensive.  Wire dog brushes will do just the same job! 🙂

Visit Rosie Pink to check out the mini tutorial on this one and I hope you enjoyed learning a bit more about hand carding!

Happy felting!