Needle Felting Tip to Create Crisper Details with a Stencil

We have a needle felting tip that might help you make your needle felting projects a little easier to detail. The photo below shows a portrait we needle felted onto alpaca fiber using the technique described on this page.

First we designed our own stencil and then we began experimenting. For most other projects, we highly recommend using a dense foam pad for needle felting. We decided to try STYROFOAM to give us a firmer surface to work on.

The styrofoam did make a nicer surface that kept our project from moving around as it did on the foam pad. So, we were happy with that change. Still, even with taping, we were not totally happy with the stencil and its movement during needle felting.

We would find that the stencil on the felt shifted slightly at times and our designs did not come out as crisp as we had wanted them. The challenge was to keep the stencil from shifting at all.

Ah Ha! Make a stencil that attaches to the felt. Hmmm...what to use...? We decided on freezer paper. Great craft medium. You know the kind you wrap meat with that is shiny on one side and dull on the other. You can get it at grocery stores and it isn't very expensive.

First we made our own stencil. Now we had to get it onto the freezer paper. Who wants to do all that tracing? Very time consuming. Well, why don't we just print it onto the freezer paper?

Great idea! First you have to figure out which way your printer prints so that it will print the stencil onto the dull side. On our printer, we have to feed the freezer paper dull side down into the printer.

OOPS, a paper jam. It won't take the freezer paper because it keeps curling. No matter how much we straightened it, it jammed. After a search on the internet, we discovered you could feed it through your printer on your regular computer paper. (Isn't the internet great! Not only can you find this needle felting tip, but you can discover how to load paper into your computer. We love it!)

Cut the freezer paper about an inch shorter than the computer paper and tape the freezer paper dull side out onto the computer paper (make the two papers meet evenly at the bottom and have the freezer paper taped one inch from the top). To get it to go through our printer, we placed it in the feeder with the taped end going in first, dull side of freezer paper down. How it feeds in will depend on the type of printer you have. You'll have to check your printer manual for how the paper feeds on your printer so that you can get it to print onto the dull side of the freezer paper.

Success! We printed the stencil onto the freezer paper. Now for cutting. There are two ways to cut the parts out that you want to needle felt. If it is a simple design, you can cut out the parts to stencil prior to ironing the stencil to the felt. We had a detailed design that we wanted to keep intact.

We first ironed the stencil onto the felt. Place the shiny side down onto the felt and iron with a hot iron. Then we used an exacto knife to cut out the parts to be needle felted. You have to cut very shallow so as not to cut the felt. It was pretty easy to do as the paper cuts away easily.

Once you have the parts to needle felt exposed, you place it on the styrofoam and needle felt the colors that you want in your project.

We hope this needle felting tip will help you to make great projects!

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