Nice work :) Do you have any good tutorials to recommend for working with wire armature? I'm quite good at sculptural needle felting, but every time I try to work with wool around the wire it slips all over the place and just generally makes things harder.

I haven't made any tutorials (yet... Maybe I should get to one on my next big project?) but I do highly recommend wrapping the wire armature with either just wool yarn, or a combination of poly-fill (stuffed-animal fluff) or upholstery foam wrapped with wool yarn. These materials are a little less likely to slip around, and provide a good, solid base for the needle felting wool roving. The tighter you wrap the base-material (foam or fluff) with yarn, the less likely it will be to slip and slide. If you choose to use upholstery foam, I recommend cutting it into strips that are about a quarter of an inch thick (or thinner, if possible), about an inch wide by three or four inches long - you can easily cut it with an exacto knife, but I don't recommend scissors because the sheering motion makes it difficult to keep the thickness of the strips consistent.

If you choose to use poly-fill, you can expect for some of the fluff-fibers to stick through the wool roving - so you might need a few extra (very, very thin) layers of wool to make sure the fluff-fibers stay in place. The good thing about using poly-fill is that if you have added too much you can easily make an incision with an exacto-knife into the area and pull out some of the fluff. It can also get fairly dense with the process of needle felting, and so it can help add a little bit (a very little bit) of stability.

Foam is best for adding stability. Also, if you choose to use foam and you want the sculpture to be poseable, make sure you leave areas of no-foam where you want the joints to be (knees hips and ankles for the legs; shoulders elbows and wrists for the arms.) If you cover those areas in foam you won't be able to achieve a lot of mobility, because there will be a lot more material in those areas. Once you have the strips cut up, you can wrap them around the armature and hold them in place with yarn - I've found that only one layer of foam is needed in most cases.

I might add that it can be very helpful to keep a few reference photos of the muscle-structure of the character you're working on - this will give you a guide on where to add the most foam or fluff, and will also help you make sure that *if* something flips or slides you can get it back in place and be certain it *is* in the right place.

Good luck!

Also also! If you want to make a wire-armature for a very small needle felt sculpture (smaller than five inches) try pipe cleaners! Since pipe-cleaners are already covered in fuzz it makes it very easy to needlefelt over. I don't recommend pipe-cleaners for larger, sculptures however, because the wire is so thin that it can't handle much weight at all. Pipe cleaners are also much less expensive than regular wire and since they're so cheap it's nice to experiment and know you aren't throwing money down the drain if it doesn't work out ;)

Thanks! I've never tried working with the foam base, I'll give that a go.