Needle Felted Pinball Bumper Necklace

Grip the wool roving with your hands a good distance apart, and pull gently.

• Twist up the fibers. The more criss-crossed they are, the easier it is to felt.
• Fold it together into a disc-like shape and begin to poke it with felting needles.

• Safety! Felting needles are the sharpest sharp thing you've ever played with, unless you're a surgeon.
• Always watch your hands while felting.
• Never felt when you're tired.
• Use shallow, soft pokes instead of heavy pokes.
• When you do stab yourself, just put a bandage on it and keep felting!

• Once it starts to form a shape and is a little bit combined, pull the disc off the foam and turn it over.
• Continue poking.

• After a while, there won't be any more loose fiber to poke.
• Loosely twist up another wisp of wool roving and wrap it around your disc.
• Lay it down on the foam and keep poking until all of the new fiber is incorporated into the disc.

• Twist, wrap, and poke many more layers of roving.
• When it's nice and thick in the middle, but the edges are still fuzzy, use tiny pokes along the edge of the disc.

• Create one large backing disc and one smaller accent disc and check that the sizing is how you like it.
• Felt shrinks as you work, so allow for things to get a bit smaller during finishing.

• Twist up a small wisp of fiber for the accent design.
• Lay it on the surface, overlapping the edges.
• Poke in a straight line across the disc.
• Pull the long tails toward the center and tack them down.

Now do the details for the top disc using tiny wisps of fiber.

• If you want your pinball bumper to light up, cut a hole in the back disc with very sharp scissors, then widen the hole with needlenose pliers.
• Affix the LED with wire or conductive thread to the battery holder. See the soft circuit sample project.
• Felt around the LED and affix the top disc.

Affix the finished pendant to a necklace.