Needle Felting: Sea Lion

I've been seeing needle felted items around the internet for a while now, and had wanted to try it, but it doesn't really seem to have reached our shores yet. However, my mother very kindly got me some needles from the Fox Collection, and dug out some wool roving that she bought many moons ago to spin, but never got round to using. Since the roving was bought with yarn in mind, not needle felting, it's all in the most gorgeous shades of blue, green, pink and purple – but not really the best if you want to felt little animals. =P 

So here is my very first attempt – a blue sea lion or fur seal. Not a true seal, because it's got little ears. 

It took about 7 hours, mainly while watching tv over three evenings so it probably didn't take quite as long as that, as I didn't want to accidentally stab myself by felting while looking at what was going on on the tv. I didn't really know what I was doing, but it was great fun, and very cathartic, too. 

Here's what I had after two hours:

And after about 4.5:

I chose to do a sea lion because I had just filled two sketchbook pages with Galapagos Sea Lions, after watching David Attenborough's Galapagos on Sunday night, and they seemed to have a nice simple shape to get started with (and having recently sketched them, I was fairly familiar with it).

(all those sketches are based on images in a random Google search)

Here are some more views:

I'm not entirely happy with the face from the front, but I'm not beating myself up over it, as I'd never so much as held a felting needle before Thursday and so I figure I'm allowed to start off a bit wonky. =P 

I added the hat and extra ball to brighten it up a bit, the blue is rather overpowering. The eyes are black beads – mostly because I like the look of shiny beads as eyes, and partly because I don't have any black roving.

What do you think? 

Dyed merino tops felted with a coarse and a fine needle. I don't know what size they are, my packet doesn't say. ~7 hours.