Felt Dilemmas!

Picture & bear by Lizette Greco--check her photostream!

I've gotten quite a few emails lately asking where I get my supplies, and whilst the answer is easy in terms of the fabrics I use, and I openly share this whenever asked, when it comes to felt I have just as many issues as everyone else. I find it really tricky to get any consistency when I'm buying the stuff, if I find a colour & texture that I like, I buy metres of it at a time, I look for it everywhere I go, and I have a designated 'felt box' where I keep it all, and another with all the scraps just in case they come in handy one day... I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm fairly precious about the stuff.

I don't really like Spotlight for about a million reasons, but strangely enough, that's where I manage to get all my face coloured felts, but they don't always have it in, so I buy lots when they do, and because I use such tiny amounts for my toys, I can get away with this. There is another chain store here called Hobby Sew which is much, much better than Spotlight, and they have lovely feeling felts, but they are in colours that just don't suit my palette.

Finding bright colours for hair and other features is tricky-- I need a certain amount of 'stiffness' for the antennae and other little features so I like a wool/acrylic blend, and I find that from store to store, and even colour to colour within certain stores, there is no consistency in terms of the strength of the felt, that the colour lines aren't reliable and that the whole thing can be a bit of a nightmare.

I have bought some lovely 100% wool and wool blend felts online through both Etsy & Ebay in the past, and whilst they felt (ha ha!) amazing, the colours I received didn't exactly match what I thought I was buying... and I actually still have beautiful quality fluro-yellow & fluro-pink felt here that I've never been able to bring myself to incorporate in any of my projects!

I have been trawling the internet in search of a good, reliable felt supplier to sort this matter out once and for all, and I guess these felt companies know that people are having trouble because they send out sample packs for just a few dollars, so I've got a couple of different American companies sending me packs right now... so maybe they'll be the solution I'm looking for... what I really want though, is a reliable Australian supplier.

If anyone has a solution to any of these problems of mine, feel free to comment or email, and let me in on your secret! Please!

Hope your Monday is a good one, I'm off to sew a little before the post office opens!
B,x!