Succulents Needle Felting Kit

This week, I’m reviewing another advanced craft kit from Timberdoodle that takes a fair amount of patience to finish — this adorable little Succulents Needle Felting Kit. The kit has everything you need to complete a collection of cute, compact cacti.

The succulents vary in shape and in level of difficulty. My daughter Abby picked one of the simpler varieties to start with.

This was our first foray into the fascinating art of felting (but won’t be our last). Felting is a fun and satisfying method of sculpting by repeatedly stabbing the shape so that the wool fibers get entangled and hold things together.

The “leaves” (or “lobes’ or whatever you call those little individual sections of a cactus) if this first project were of a rounded shape tinged with touch of terra cotta.

I don’t have very many “in progress” photos of the cacti, mainly because I eventually took the project over and finished them myself (and it’s hard to felt and snap photos simultaneously).

Although at 12, Abby’s right at the recommended age for tackling this project — it’s part of Timberdoodle’s 7th Grade Curriculum Kit — she found it a little too tedious and time consuming to suit her taste.

Compared to most of the quick craft kits she’s done in the past (which take less than an hour and some mere minutes to finish), she’s right. This craft kit represents a much bigger time investment.

But for somebody like me who has been crocheting and quilting and needlepointing for years and is used to projects taking days or weeks or months (or even decades!) to complete, this little felting project worked up fairly fast.

I don’t think we made our felted cacti quite as dense as they were intended to be, though. While I’m satisfied with how ours turned out, we had a lot of wool left over at the end of the project. So, never being one to waste anything (especially high end art materials), I created a little project all my own.

Using the leftover wool plus some assorted felt scraps I’d accumulated while sewing sequined Christmas stockings, I made a folksy looking “F” (for “Flanders” — get it?) to hang on the gallery wall in my den.

Where do you and your kids fall on the craft-commitment-continuum? Do you like easy crafts that work up quickly? Or challenging projects that require a little more time? You answer may tell you whether this Succulents Needle Felting Kit is a good fit for your family.

Hint: if you have more than one child who loves arts and crafts like we do, you can let three of them split this kit between them. Order yours today from Timberdoodle. And while you’re there, look around. We love everything we’ve ever ordered from this small family-owned company!

Be sure to sign up for their Doodle Dollar program to save on future purchases. And to read more of my Timberdoodle Reviews, follow this link.

PLEASE NOTE: As a member of the Timberdoodle blog team, I routinely receive free or deeply discounted products in exchange for writing honest reviews. Opinions expressed in these posts are 100% my own. I’ve been a happy and enthusiastic Timberdoodle customer for decades — long before I ever started blogging for their company.