Here is a picture of my new "baby":
I could literally play on this thing all day, but I have to get ready to leave for a week of vacation with my family, so I only got to do a short test drive. Basically this is a machine needle felter. There are 7 barbed needles, but no thread. You are sort of "meshing" together layers of fabrics with the needles.
Here are some samples I was playing with. I was using as the background the leg left over from a jeans purse. The blue/green stuff to the left is the scraps of silk from a tie bag I made. On top of that I put some green wool yarn. To the right are some little butterflies and dragonflies I cut from a piece of cotton batik fabric. The yarns on that side are cotton and a polyester blend.
Here is a picture of the machine in action!
So all of the test samples seemed to work out fine, and the denim was about as heavy a fabric as I plan on using, so I thought this made a fine test drive. SO I decided to make a quick little bag that I could use on vacation to test how the embellishments will hold up to use. So I cut more of the motifs from the butterfly batik fabric and made this bag:
...and the back has some test yarn:
Update: The embellished part of the purse held up great through the entire vacation, but the strap was not stiff enough and got all wrinkly...
