Alpaca,Llama,Mohair amd wool needle felt animals

 The above critters are a blend of fibers with wool needle felted sculpture an added thick layer of alpaca, llama and mohair felted into base and then reverse felted . It takes almost as long to do the reverse felting  as it does to shape the base sculpture , about 50-60 hours total for each animal . Below is the guy I worked on all last week and I did add the leather lids with mohair lashes but I still need to find a better way to do them . The hardest part is getting the lashes to curl up . I ended up using hairspray but that leaves them spikier then I would like .

One of the things I have always wanted to mention about working with animal fibers is that it actually has "memory" . You can see on the new animal below that one ear is open and one is curled . Although they are not wired, you can actually do some basic repositioning and they will stay that way until you reposition them .

 Below, I am holding the arm up and when I let go, you can see that it retains some of that movement and then you can simply return it to original position . Although the animals are very firmly felted, they still have some natural movement if you want to move their arms, head or legs . I just think that is pretty cool .

Now I just need to get a green screen so I can do some stop motion movies with them . (That will never happen because I am so tech stupid but maybe someone else will try it ?)

Happy felting .