Baby Quokka

I completed this needle-felted baby quokka in October, and quite forgot to blog about it. Oops. So I'm remedying that now.

  

   

   

He's about life-size for a baby quokka and sits comfortably into my hands. Adult quokkas are considerably larger, of course. 

For quite a while he sat unfinished, with no fur (I was busy with other work), and no one had a kind word to say about him. 

(Apologies for the poor quality of these progress photos. They were taken with my ipad, at night. Not the best for clarity.)

  

 

And it wasn't the end of the indignity - once I started rooting in his fur, poor quokka went through a terrible stage of having an entirely bald bum:

   

I rooted in all his fur individually, using hand-cut and hand-mixed lengths of roving in various shades of brown.  This resulted in a fluff-ball quokka for a while, until I trimmed and combed the fur. I did some rough trimming as I went, simply because that makes it easier to see where I'm going, but when all the fur was in I did a proper trim all over him.

Yes, that's a pet slicker-brush you see there. Myrna won't stand for that going anywhere near her, so I have repurposed it. It works well for combing felted in fur, providing you don't brush too hard (and pull it all out =P)

He's got a dacron filling (dacron felts very nicely, and is cheaper than wool) with corridale wool over the top. His fur is a mix of corridale and merino wools - the lighter brown on his tummy is superfine merino, which (as well as being the very devil to felt) tends to mat up a bit and so isn't as good for fur as standard merino. But I didn't have the right colour in any other wool.