Needle Felted Stop Motion Animation is Magical 

Needle felted stop motion animation is a gorgeous and dynamic way to use wool to tell stories and explore your felting skills. Once you've tested the waters with felting basics, you can learn to make armatures for inside your felted creations so you can make them move! 

What is Needle Felted Stop Motion Animation?

According to our friend good ol' Wikipedia, 

"Stop motion is an animated filmmaking technique in which objects are physically manipulated in small increments between individually photographed frames so that they will appear to exhibit independent motion or change when the series of frames is played back. Any kind of object can thus be animated, but puppets with movable joints (puppet animation) or plasticine figures (clay animation or claymation) are most commonly used. Puppets, models or clay figures built around an armature are used in model animation."

Needle Felted stop animation involves felting wool onto a wire armature. It takes a bit of patience, but our Needle Felted Spider tutorial is a great place to start. Since the felted spider has wire legs, it can be moved to pose for each photo. We created this moving gif below over the course of an evening. We used an overhead diy tripod made from pvc pipes to shoot from above..

Here is another project we made:

One of our biggest inspirations is an artist named Andrea Love. Below is a video portfolio of Andrea's work which we hope will inspire you too!

REEL 2019 from Andrea Love on Vimeo.

Creating Armatures For Felted Creations

Below is an in depth video by another felting artist on creating armatures for stop motion. It is a very simple process. The  only part that is a bit tricky (at first) is learning to felt around the wire. Basically, don't hit the wire with the felting needle or you'll break it! You can either use pipecleaners, or bare wire with foam, Both options work great, but bare wire lasts longer.

Tag us on Instagram if you decide to try this awesome activity!