Needle Felt Peach

These adorable felt wool peaches are perfect for summer, kitchen, nursery or birthday decor. Follow this easy tutorial to learn how to make a needle felt peach.

Hey friends! I am excited to share this fun project with you guys today! I am always up for learning new crafts and needle felting was one that I had not attempted before. Unquestionably it would be best to start with a simple shape, and seeing as how we are coming into summer, I decided to make a needle felt peach to go with my some of my summer decorating.

I will be sharing some of that peach decor with you soon, but first let’s talk about these cute wool peaches! They were not hard to make at all! If you are not familiar with needle felting, essentially it is a craft that uses special notched needles and wool to create shapes and designs. Needle felting is a little time consuming, if I’m being honest with you. However, it was somewhat relaxing and satisfying while doing the needle felting too. Although, you have to take a break between peaches as your hand will get tired! Ha!

My mother-in-law happened to be in town while I was going to attempt this, so we were able to learn and work on these together! 🙂 Crafting is always more fun with a partner. Since I never claim to be an expert at any craft that I do, especially when I am new to it, this is not really going to be a how to needle felt tutorial. More like a how WE made needle felted peaches tutorial. LOL! It includes all the tips and tricks we learned as we did it. However, if after you read this and watch the video, you still have more questions, there are many great videos on YouTube on how to needle felt. I advise you to check those out for more instruction!

Felt Wool Peaches

We had to experiment a little bit as we were making these felt peaches, since it was our first time doing it. I really wanted them to be shaded so we tried to add different colors of wool to make the shading but that did not turn out as well as I’d hoped. It still gave a cool swirly look to a couple of the peaches as you can see in the picture below but for the most of them, I ended up shaded them with chalk as you will see later.

These little felt peaches can be used in lots of ways for decorating. You can just put them in a decorative bowl or vase, add them to some greenery in a table centerpiece or you could make them into a felt peach garland! They would also be fantastic as gift toppers. I have also seen felt fruit used as sensory play items, although I would definitely leave off the leaves and stems in that case! No matter how you use them, they will be super cute!

WATCH THE QUICK VIDEO

Don’t want to read all the instructions? I have included a video in this post showing you how to make a needle felt peach. If you can’t see the video, turn off your ad blocker. Also, if you ever want to slow down the video, just click on the three dots in the lower right hand corner of the video and you can change the playback speed. If you want more detailed instructions, continue reading.

Supplies to make a needle felt peach

*There are links to products in this post that I use or are similar to products I use. If you buy something from one of these links, I may make a small commission (with no additional cost to you) from the purchase. I will not recommend anything that I would not buy myself.

Light Orange (Peach) Colored Wool Roving
Needle Felting Kit
Chalk Pastels – I have had mine for many years, but these are similar to mine
Felt Sheet – olive green
Scissors
Small twigs from yard
Hot Glue Gun and Glue Sticks

How to make a felt wool ball

The first step in making a needle felt peach is to make a needle felted wool ball. The wool you will use to create this ball is called wool roving and it is a long strand of wool fiber that has been processed but not yet spun into yarn. You can get it in all sorts of colors and from what I have read, roving wool is not all created equally. I ended up choosing some for not only the color, as I was looking for a peach color, but it had also had good reviews. It ended up working well for this project, but of course I don’t have anything to compare it to, so take that as you may.

The needle felting kit I bought came with three different sized needles, 36, 38 and 40 gauge. The higher the number, the finer the needle, so I used the 36 gauge needles to start working the wool and used the 40 gauge needle for the finishing work. The way these needles work to felt the wool is that they have little notches on them that catch the individual wool fibers and tangle them together as you poke the needle in and out. As you continue to work the wool this way, it gets more dense and smaller in size.

Tear off a 10-12 inch section of the wool. To do this, GENTLY spread apart the fibers. You won’t be able to grab it all at once and tear it apart. Work it apart a little at a time, slowly, and it comes apart like butter! This amount of wool made peaches that are about 1¾” in diameter.

Fold the length of wool into thirds.

Form a loose ball

Start rolling in the corners and work the wool until you have a loosely shaped ball, holding it together with one hand.

Just another tip, the needle felting kit came with a felt pad to use, but I saw others who used dense foam pieces instead as the wool sometimes sticks to the felt pad. The felt pad still works but if you have a spare piece of dense foam around that works really well. If you like Disney Loungefly mini backpacks, the piece I used came out of the front pocket that was used as the packing material. It works perfectly!

Place your loose ball on the pad/foam and start poking a 36 gauge needle (in the single needle holder) into the shape, going all the way through the wool. Turn the wool all around as you go to hit all sides. Continue pulling in the corners to the center as you go. You will notice that the fibers will start sticking together themselves so you no longer have to hold it together. Just a warning, watch your fingers!! There are finger guards included in the kit and I did use those when using the multi needle holder but it was easier to control the single needle without them. You will poke your fingers a couple times and yes, it does hurt! But you definitely get more careful about keeping your fingers out of the way. LOL!

How to make your wool felt ball smoother

Keep working the wool until it get a little tighter and holds it’s shape. We noticed after making the first couple of peaches, that we ended up with a side of the felt wool ball that looked more lumpy than the other sides. This was where all the folded in corners came together. It looks like a brain, huh? Now there’s an idea! Felt brains for Halloween! Ha!

My MIL came up with the brilliant idea to add an extra small piece of wool over the top of that area and felt it down. This worked wonders for making that side looks much smoother!

Much better, right?! Now, time to really get serious!

Felt faster with the multiple needles

This is the point where I switched to the multi-needle holder. The first couple of peaches we made, we did it all with one needle the whole time. Our hands were tired! Using multiple needles at a time sped up the process a lot! Although, don’t forget to use the finger guards! I was able to watch/listen to a TV show while doing this. Although it was more listening than watching as I had to watch for my fingers too. 😉

The more you poke the wool ball with the needles, the smaller and denser it will become. Make sure to turn the ball all around to work all sides.

Keep working the ball until it gets firm and rounded.

As you work the ball, you can also roll it in your hands to help smooth it out.

Use the finer needle for finish work

To smooth out the felt wool ball, use a 40 gauge needle for the finishing touches. We even noticed that going in at an angle helped to knit the fibers together along the top of the ball. We were lucky in that we did not break any needles in this project, but evidently it happens, then you have to fish the needle out of the wool. Whew! I’m glad that didn’t happen!

When your felt wool ball is done, now is the time to form the peach shape. At the top of the ball, start rapidly poking the same spot over and over. This will make a depression in the ball where the stem will go.

Next you will want to make the seam on the peach. Starting from the depression and going about 3/4 of the way down the peach, make a line by again repeatedly poking in the same area over and over.

Shade your peach with accent colors

Like I said above, we tried a couple different ways to add more color to the peach by adding other colored wool, but it did not work as well as I would have liked. It does give a cool swirly effect though if that is what you are going for. I decided to use chalk after doing a bit of research on it. Luckily, I already had chalk pastels from my Stampin’ Up days.

I used a Q-tip to apply the chalk. I started with a ruddy red color to add some pinkness to the felt peach. Use a LIGHT hand when applying the chalk. I used a circular motion above where I wanted to apply it and slowly lowered the Q-tip on the peach. It seemed to start adding color before I even touched the peach. I imagine some of the fibers were sticking up and caught the chalk. I added the pink color where it seemed like the peach had rounded edges, including the back of the peach.

Then I came in with an orange chalk and filled in some of the areas that were not pink. I also left some of the peach untouched. Again, use a light hand.

Add a leaf and stem to your needle felt peach

The last steps are to add the stem and leaf to make the peach look more realistic. I cut some leaves from a 1″ strip of olive green felt. Cut off a small piece from the strip and cut it into a leaf shape.

Glue the leaf down to the top of the peach.

Find some small twigs outside and break off about a one inch piece from one. Glue the end of the stem into the depression on the peach.

Now you have a finished needle felt peach! What do you think? Does it sound easy or intimidating? My MIL and I both thought it was easy and somewhat satisfying, but that it took a bit of time. For reference, when I recorded myself to make the video, it took me about 40 minutes to make one felt peach from beginning to end. So, it is not a quick craft but definitely cute and worth it if you have the time to spend on it.

Here are some other felt projects you may enjoy:

When I was planning my summer peach decor, I was torn between making felt peaches and fabric peaches. So I made both! Ha! I will be back soon to share my fabric peach tutorial. Chat soon!