Felted Christmas Ornaments: Two Ways to Build Them, and Twelve Worth Making

Felt ornaments survive a household better than almost anything else on the tree. They do not shatter, a cat can pull one off without consequence, and a set of twelve costs what one blown-glass bauble does. Wool softens rather than degrades, so the same set goes back up for twenty years — provided it gets a few minutes of attention each December, because the one thing felt does do is fluff.

What most people never discover is that there are two entirely different ways to make them: needle felted in the round from loose wool, or cut from felt sheet and stitched. They want different materials and very different amounts of time, and each suits shapes the other handles badly. Choosing the wrong route is why a box of half-made ornaments is still there in January.

Most of the shapes below are covered in detail elsewhere — chiefly the felted ball, the base of half of them.

The two ways to build an ornament

Needle felted in the round

Loose wool stabbed with a barbed needle into a solid three-dimensional object. Core wool inside, colour on the surface, no sewing and no template. A 50 mm bauble is about 14 g of wool and twenty-five to forty minutes.

Use it for anything seen from every side: baubles, puddings, snowmen, gnomes, animals. It is also the only route to a real sphere. The cost is time: twelve ornaments is twelve separate builds.

Cut and stitched from felt sheet

Shapes cut to a template from wool felt fabric, two identical pieces blanket stitched round the edge with two strands of embroidery thread, then stuffed lightly or left flat. Ten to twenty minutes a piece, with all the cutting done in one sitting.

Use it for crisp outlines: stars, hearts, trees, mittens, gingerbread people, letters. What it cannot do is a sphere — a stuffed felt circle is a small cushion — or the furred surface that makes a wool animal look alive.

Which to choose

Per piece, cut and stitched is roughly twice as fast, and the gap widens with quantity: cutting twelve pairs of stars is under an hour of scissor work, needle felting twelve baubles takes six hours. For a dozen in two evenings, cut and stitch; for roundness and a wool surface, needle felt and start earlier. The two mix in one set, and felt applique bridges them.

Size and weight

Most tree ornaments want to be 50 to 80 mm across. Below 40 mm they vanish into the branches; above 100 mm you are making a statement piece, not a set.

Weight decides where a piece can hang, and solid wool is heavier than people expect. Firm needle felted wool runs about 0.22 g per cubic centimetre, so a solid ball goes 7 g at 40 mm, 14 g at 50 mm, 25 g at 60 mm, 40 g at 70 mm and 59 g at 80 mm. The figure roughly trebles every time the diameter goes up by half, which is why an ornament that felt reasonable at 50 mm is unhangable at 80. Past roughly 40 g a spruce tip bends and the ornament faces the floor.

Cut and stitched pieces are in a different class altogether: a stuffed felt sheet star of the same width is 2 to 3 g and hangs from anything. Keep solid pieces on thick inner branches and stitched ones at the tips. Do not fix weight by under-firming: a soft ornament pills and loses its shape for good. Make it smaller instead.

Plan the set, not the ornament

The mistake is one elaborate decoration in November and no time left. A tree needs a dozen ornaments to look intentional, so pick designs of twenty to forty minutes and repeat them in colour variations.

A workable set: four baubles in three colours, three puddings, two robins, three stars. Roughly eight hours, spread over a few evenings.

A set that looks made, not accumulated

• One palette. Three colours and a neutral, chosen once. The usual failure is five different reds, each fine on its own. For depth within a colour, blend your own shades from the same two fibres.
• One scale. Pick a size and stay within a couple of centimetres of it. Mixed sizes read as a collection gathered over years.
• Repeated shapes. Three of each design rather than one of twelve. Repetition reads as intent, and the second and third are much faster than the first.

Beginner ornaments

1. Plain baubles

A firm felted ball with a hanging loop. That is the whole design, and a cluster in three toning colours looks better than the effort suggests. See felted Christmas balls for the method.

2. Striped and spotted baubles

The same ball with thin wisps of contrasting wool felted onto the surface. Spots are easier than stripes; a stripe wanders unless the line is laid carefully before you stab.

3. Christmas puddings

A dark ball with a white flat piece felted over the top so it drapes down one side like icing, finished with a red berry and two green leaves. Three colours, no template and no sewing, which is why it is the design most people make second.

4. Stars

A flat shape, either felted on the mat or cut from sheet. Five even points are fiddly enough that stars have their own page: the template geometry, the cutting, the two-layer version and the edge finishes are all in felt star ornaments.

5. Candy canes

A white sausage with a red strip spiralled round it, felted in, then bent into a hook and worked at the curve; a pipe cleaner inside makes it permanent.

6. Snowmen

Two or three graduated balls joined, with a fabric scarf and a tiny hat. Keep the face minimal — two dots and a carrot nose.

Intermediate ornaments

7. Robins

An egg-shaped body, a smaller head blended in, a red-orange breast panel on the front, a small beak and a flat tail. Good practice in joining and blending.

8. Gingerbread people

A flat shape with felted white piping. The icing lines teach controlled surface work with a fine needle.

9. Woodland animals

Foxes, deer heads, hedgehogs and owls. Heads alone on a loop are quicker than whole animals and hang better; sizing, loop placement and which species work at this scale are in felt animal ornaments.

10. Holly and mistletoe sprigs

Flat leaves with a firm midrib and small berries — the same technique as felted flowers, in a seasonal palette.

Beyond the tree

11. Felt ball garland

Twenty to thirty wet felted balls threaded on cord. Wet felting is the right method — needle felting thirty balls one at a time is a joyless weekend, and wet felting makes them in batches.

12. Advent garland

Twenty-four small ornaments, numbered, pegged to twine. Enormous in December, manageable started in September at two a week.

Names, initials and years

A personalised ornament is the one that gets kept, and the trick is cutting letters rather than felting them. A cut letter needs no hem and no backing, which is what makes felt sheet the right material for lettering.

1. Print the name at size: 25 to 30 mm for an initial, 12 to 15 mm for a full name across a 70 mm shape.
2. Reverse the paper, pin it to the back of the felt and cut round it, hiding the pencil line.
3. Stitch each letter down with a single strand and small stab stitches, or back stitch through the middle of thin letters.
4. A year sits along the bottom of a star or across a stocking cuff, four digits at 15 mm.

Do not needle felt lettering below about 40 mm. Wool spreads as you stab it and a lower-case "e" fills in within a minute. A few seed beads round a name read better at that scale and weigh nothing.

Hanging loops: do it properly

A loop that pulls out on Boxing Day is the standard failure. Three methods hold.

• Felted-in loop: lay the two loose ends of a doubled cord across the top of the ornament and felt a wisp of wool over them. The wool traps the thread, and it is stronger than it looks.
• Sewn through: for a piece that is already finished. Start underneath, with a long doll needle and strong thread: up through the body and out at the top, leave a loop of the length you want, back down through the body a few millimetres from where you came up, and knot the two tails together against the underside. Both ends finish where they started, which is the only place a knot is out of sight. Best for heavier pieces.
• Caught in the seam: on a stitched ornament, trap a folded ribbon loop between the layers at the top before you blanket stitch past it, so the seam holds it rather than two stitches.

Never glue a loop on. Wool is fibrous, and when the glue fails it takes a patch of surface with it.

Common problems

• The bauble is not round. Keep rotating it as you stab; never finish one face before starting another.
• The branch droops. Too dense for its position. Move it inboard and make the next one 10 mm smaller, not softer.
• The blanket stitch gapes. Stitches too far apart, or too shallow to hold the two layers together — depth and spacing both matter, and the numbers that work are on felt star ornaments.
• The set looks random. Too many colours. Remake anything outside your three rather than trying to make it belong.

Making them last

Store ornaments in a box with tissue rather than compressed in a bag — felt takes a permanent crease under pressure. A sealed box with a cedar block, checked once a year, is enough; see protecting wool from moths if you have had an infestation.

Under-felted surfaces pill and every surface fluffs eventually. Work the outer layer with a 40 gauge needle until it stops taking fibre, and give each piece a pass as it comes out of the box.

If you are selling them

Felted ornaments sell well at Christmas markets, and the numbers work only if you batch: twelve bodies, then twelve sets of detail, rather than one whole ornament at a time. Batching roughly halves the time per piece. Cut and stitched pieces batch better and take personalisation, which is where the margin is.

The same shapes carry the rest of the year: a felted heart in February, felted eggs in spring, pumpkins in October. Starting from nothing, make three plain baubles, then a felted angel or a gnome for the treetop.