It has been a while since I shared some needle felting. I'm a bit out of practice, but I got some new needles as well as more wool batting and more. However I am in love with these adorable needle felted cats. The book is Fantastic Felted Cats: A Guide to Making Lifelike Kitten Figures by Housetsu Sato.
From the Publisher:
From playful tabbies to fierce black cats, this book shows you how to create felted felines in every shape and posture: crouching, preening, stretching, napping and ready to pounce!
Master Japanese felting artist and teacher (and a great cat lover himself) Housetsu Sato shows you how to become an expert in capturing a cat's essential form and character—especially at the kitten stage, when they are full of surprises.
In this book Sato teaches you how to:
- Form the basic shapes and cat body parts
- Create a variety of familiar cat poses and postures
- Add realistic textures and markings to the fur
- Give unique expressions to your cat faces
Along the way, he shows you how to infuse your felted friends with a playful sense of "cattitude," including how to incorporate fur from your real kitties into your felted models.
Detailed instructions and photos for each cat piece, fur texture and marking make these projects friendly even if you are new to felting. Full-size templates help you form the correct shapes and proportions, and brief lessons in cat anatomy help you make your felted cats truly lifelike. Photos showing variations on the poses and markings make it easy to envision your own cat's likeness emerging from your hands.
From Me:
The book begins with information about needle felting, materials and tools. Then there are the techniques. The book goes through the tutorials for the basic parts of the cats. You have to flip back to these pages to use the different tutorials.
Once you have the necessary body parts you are ready to customize your cat. The tutorials help you do this. I decided to make the grey tabby and white cat and try to change the customization to look like our new grey and white kitten. I started by making the head following the tutorial above.
After the head tutorial is the body tutorial, legs, and tail as well as the thighs. Once these are made you can get to putting it all together and create your own cat. The cats are in different poses and have different coloring as well as fur length. The book even shares how you can use your own cat's fur in the project (removed by brushing/shedding). I haven't tried this yet.
The cats use doll/stuffed animal eyes. I could only find brown ones, so my cat now has brown eyes instead of the yellow greenish ones he actually has. They are very easy to use. The book has photographs to help with everything including size templates in the back for the body parts. I did not use them, and it shows in my final cat. Hazel however loves it!
The head is definitely too small for the body and the ears got too big as did the legs. He is still cute though!
Hazel asked me to make one of our other cat. Since she has long fur I may try to use her fur in it. She is black and white and there is a black and white cat, but I love the one stretching more since she often is doing that. I'm going to use the size templates this time. This book is full of adorable cat projects. I hope you will check it out!
We have been included in an article by international resource publisher, Twinkl - you can read more here.
