POTIONSMITH: Creepmas Cthulhu

This was inspired by this gnome project, and a generous friend who had me over for my first felting experience. Which was a fail, but then I came home and did this with the stuff she gave me. Being that this is my first felting project ever, take this tutorial for what it is, a work in progress. If you don't know anything about felting I'd watch a few tutorials on Youtube. I found this video to be very informative.

The Cthulhu above was made basically the same way as the following tutorial, but I've tried doing a few things differently. Whether they are improvements remains to be seen, I'm still trying to figure things out. The biggest difference is the "tentacles" on the guy above are made with curly wool locks. My friend just happened to have a handful of teal roving and a bit of the curly stuff, which was just enough to make two Cthulhu's. I can't wait to have her pick out her favorite, after all none of this would've happened without her.

I saw this tutorial on how make felt balls by shaking them around in a dish. My ball didn't entirely ball up as you can see, I don't know what I did wrong, but it still gave me a nice foundation to work with.

I covered it with more roving and felted it into a round oval shape. You want it to be firm, but not too firm.

I didn't have enough of the curly stuff for another full set of tentacles, so I got creative. I started with rolling the roving into thin worm shapes. The three tentacles on the left were braided together, dampened with a little water, the ends where curled around the braid and left to dry. The only change with the two in the middle is they were braided with a piece of cord and that made for looser waves. The one on the far right is the actual curly wool for comparison.

I liked the ones in the middle the best but I want them a little less kinky, there's something I thought I'd never say, so I doubled the strands before braiding. The picture below shows four rolls of roving braided with a piece of cord. Again I wet the whole thing and curled the ends of the roving around the black cord and then let it dry.

And this is how they turned out.

After the tentacles are made or if you have curly locks, fold them in half and starting at the bottom felt them into place.

Continue with the next row.

And the next.

Now it's time to firmly felt the head and then add details. Here I just indented the eye area, left kind of a brow ridge and felted the forehead some more. You could also make the details more prominent by felting in a darker shade.

Next is the hat. Back to the original inspiration, per the pinecone gnome instructions I cut out a triangle 3 3/4 inch on all sides, folded it in half and stitched up the side.

Here it is turned inside out to hide the stitching. This makes a very gnomish hat, I'll probably play with different sizes in the future.

To add a little puff ball at the end, grab some white roving and roll it into a little ball.

Start by felting it directly to the tip of the hat. I poked the eraser end of a pencil into the hat to hold it without poking my fingers. Once it's on there pretty good you can focus more on shaping it into a nice ball. You could also just make a separate ball and stitch or glue it on. You could also just glue on a pom pom, but where's the fun in that?

If you want the hat folded over you can stitch it in place or do like I did and insert a pipecleaner. For the first Cthulhu, I just used a piece of pipecleaner, with the ends folder over so it's not pokey. This time I wrapped it in a little cotton batting to fill out the hat more. I think I liked it better without the extra padding, but I don't think you can even see a difference in the pictures.