Bee in a Bottle Charm

Hi!

This is my instructable on how to make a little felted bee in a bottle. Its pretty simple and easy to make even if you've never used a felting needle before. I've only recently started making felted crafts and this is my first design I made my self. I'll explain the basics of how to use a felting needle, but there are plenty of helpful videos and books out there for more information.

Okay, here we go...

For this project you'll need:

• Five colors of felting wool (bright yellow, pale yellow, black, white, and green)
• A felting needle
• A needle felting pad
• Tweezers
• A small awl
• Scissors
• Craft glue
• Two tiny plastic safety eyes
• A mini glass bottle with a cork
• a finger glove (I lost mine to i didn't use it here but they are very helpful if you don't want to be stabbed by the needle)

None of my local craft stores carry any needle felting supplies so I had to order some online. I don't use the most expensive stuff but I would suggest avoiding really cheap needles and wool. Cheap needles break easily and cheap wool can be rough and hard to work with.

Start with the bright yellow wool. How much you'll need will depend on the size of your bottle. Use your hands to loosely ball the wool up into an oval shape. You want the oval to be a little shorter than twice the width of the bottle. Now use the felting needle to felt the wool into a tight oval.

If you haven't used a felting needle here a quick tutorial to get started:

A felting needle is a very sharp needle with downward facing barbs around the tip. Felting is pretty simple, just stab the needle into the wool over and over and over and over again. Eventually the wool will start to condense and become a solid shape. The more you stab it with the needle the more condensed and solid it will become. Because felting needles are so thin and have notched out barbs they are very fragile. When using one make sure to only stab the needle straight in and pull it straight out in the same direction. Bending or putting too much pressure on the side will break the needle.

A felting pad is usually a piece of foam covered with fabric. You should always do your felting on top of a felting pad. If the needle pokes through the wool it will poke into the pad and protect both the needle and you.

Finger gloves are a good idea to keep your fingers safe since the needle is very sharp. They cover the fingers that you'll be using to hold the wool while felting.

To start felting, choose a color of wool and pull out however much you need for your project, remember you can always add more later but can't take it back. Use your hands to ball the wool into vaguely the shape you want. Hold the wool down on the felting pad with one hand wearing the finger gloves and start stabbing the wool with the needle. Try not to poke the needle all the way through the wool. Just keep stabbing the wool all over until it starts to come together in the shape you want. Remember to roll the wool over to get all sides.

That should get you started. I'll explain more as we work through this instructable!

Now its time to add stripes to the little bee. Pull out a thin strip of black wool. Wrap it around the bee body at about a third of the width of the oval. Use the felting needle and stab along the black stripe to secure it to the bee. Use scissors the cut the excess black wool on the bottom of the bee and then stab with the needle to secure the cut ends.

Pull out a piece of the pale yellow wool and form it into a disk. Use this to cover about a third of the oval on the end opposite to the black stripe. Use the felting needle to stab and secure the disk the body. Now make a smaller black disk and center it on the pale yellow and secure it there. This will be the rear end of the little bee.

Use another strip of black wool to make a stripe where the pale and bright yellows meet.

Time to add eyes. Use the small awl or other thin pointy object to poke holes on the front of the bee where you want the eyes to be. You might need to wiggle the awl around a little and push kind of hard to get it to go through the wool. once the holes are made insert the pegs of the safety eyes into the hole to make sure they're big enough and in the right places. Because my bee is so tiny, I had to cut the pegs on the back of the eyes a little shorter so they would fit easier.

Once you are happy with the eye placement, put a little glue on the end of the pegs and and insert the eyes. hold them in place for a minutes and then leave the glue to dry for a few minutes.

While the glue is drying its time to make wings. Pull out some white wool and fold it in half. It will make a kind of wing shape where its folded. It should be a little bigger than what you want the final wing size to be. Pull out a second piece of white wool the same size and fold it the same way. Now, one at a time, set them on the felting pad and start stabbing. Because its so thin its going to seem like its taking forever and not coming together but keep stabbing and eventually it will. Remember flip it every once in a while. As it starts coming together, slowly fold in the outer edges to shrink and form it into the right shape.

Once you have two wings, cut the excess wool off and use the needle to attach them right behind the first stripe.

To make this step easier you can just get a sheet of white crafting felt and cut the wings out of that and then attach the same way with the felting needle.

Now that you have a cute little bee friend lets stick it in a Bottle!

Pull out some green wool and stab it a couple of time to get it to stick together a little. Use the tweezers and put the green wool in the bottom of the bottle so the bee has a nice cushion of grass. Now its the bees turn. Put the bee in head first so the wings don't get stuck. it might be a tight squeeze but it should eventually pop in with a little squishing. Use the tweezers to get the bee into the orientation you want and recork the bottle. depending on what you want to do with it you might want to glue the cork on so it doesn't pop off. The bottle I used already had an attachment on the cork so I could add a chain and wear the bee charm as a necklace or hang it by my desk.

Now that you know how to make a tiny bee in a bottle, I hope you make one and I'd love to see pictures! Feel free to change up the colors and sizes and if you have any questions just ask and I'll do my best to answer them!

Thank you for reading, I hope you liked my instructable!