Easy Needle Felted Fleece Scarf: free tutorial

You all know that I’ve fallen for a new type of fiber art lately… machine needle felting. I shared some tips and tricks in this blog post. Anyway, there aren’t very many project tutorials to be found with machine needle felting, so here’s my first one. It’s very simple and you can use a hand felting technique too. In this tutorial I will show needle felting by machine, since that’s what I did.

This is the wool scarf I made my brother Joe first. I used this gorgeous stretch wool interlock from Nature’s Fabrics, but they are all out. I really wanted to make a couple more scarves so I found something softer and way less costly… simple fleece.

To make one scarf you will need  to cut 10” of black fleece that is 58-60” wide. I found this at Joanns, it’s the anti-pill variety. Feel free to modify the width of the scarf, or cut it lengthwise if you would like a longer scarf (that will require a lot more fabric).

You’ll also need some Wool Roving Yarn, like that pictured. This yarn is beautiful and soft and it easily separates (like regular roving) if you untwist it.

Cut the weird curly ends off the long rectangle of fleece. Then fold it in half lengthwise to make a crease, and mark the crease with chalk. This makes it easier to keep your line of wool roving yarn straight.

Place the yarn along the chalk line, with a little bit hanging over the end of the scarf. Keep in mind that the yarn length will shrink a little as you felt, so don’t stretch it. Just lay it loosely on top of the fleece.

This project is great because there are no little pieces to glue or try to hold down. You can start a few inches from the end, holding the yarn on either side. Once your yarn in felted to the fleece in that spot (and it happens fairly quickly), you can felt back towards the end of the scarf.

Work your way down to the other end of the scarf. I like to felt in a slow zig zag motion, being careful not to stop in one spot for very long (that would cause a hole). As you can see, I also took most of the needles out of the needle head so I was only working with 4. The felting machine is cool because you don’t have to worry about anything going wrong if you felt right off the edge of your project. 

Then you can snip the fuzzy yarn ends off if you want, or leave them on. Up to you. Once you see how easy it is to felt wool roving yarn to fleece your mind will go crazy with all the other designs you could make. Mine did. 🙂

But this simple stripe is perfect for a guy. I made one for my husband too.

So leave a note in the comments if you are a machine felter too… I want to hear from you!

xoxo,