The Felting of Frankengeorge

Last month, I decided to achieve my lifelong (okay, four months long) dream of felting my cat... as in, needle felting a miniature version of him. Hands Tailung, a cool Japanese department store, had felt sculpture kits, including one for a ginger-spotted cat. I figured all I needed to do was make a few modifications.

The weird thing about the kit was that even though the original Japanese instructions only took up two pages, the Chinese instructions had NINE sheets. They were only printed on one side of each page and every other (double-spaced)
sentence basically said "refer to diagram in Japanese instructions." Talk about inefficiency!

The kit came with wool and two beady glass eyes (I bought a new pair because the included eyes were just a little too beady). To this pile, I added my special ingredient -- our cat's very own fur!

This tuft is the result of several vigorous brushings and is almost an exact match for the ginger-colored wool in the kit.

This is my first felted sculpture (aside from a watermelon-shaped pincushion I made once), so it came out a little lumpy looking. But I like to think I did a good job of capturing Taroko George's crazy essence!

Taroko George was certainly fascinated by Frankengeorge. I think the fact that Frankengeorge smelled like a mixture of wool, my hands and his own fur really confused/intrigued my cat. The two had to be separated after Taroko George tried to gnaw Frankengeorge's head off.

If any of you decide to try needle felt sculpting, I strongly recommend that you buy a protective leather glove. It's a pill spending US$15 to US$20 for one, but it sure beats being stabbed by little barbed needles (ouch!).