How to needle felt a rotten apple with a worm

Maria Filipe Castro, better known as Droolwool, teaches you how to create a rotten apple with a worm for Halloween

This rotten apple with worm is an art toy that is part of the Apple & Worm series by Droolwool (@droolwool). This year, she's taken inspiration from Halloween to create a new, scarier version.

To recreate this piece, you will need wadding, carded wool in four different colors, and felt needles of different sizes, with one thick and the other one thinner.

The colors you use are up to you, so feel free to customize your piece and pick ones that you like.

Follow these simple steps to create your own needle felted rotten apply with a worm:

1. Create the apple shape

To create the basic apple shape, you need to fold a wadding rectangle and poke it with a thick needle until the shape is set before covering it with wool. Once you cover the base you can begin sculpting the shape of the apple, refining the piece to make it narrower at the bottom than at the top.

Then create three concave indents, two for the eyes and one where the mouth will go. You can then fill these with darker wool to create contrast.

2. The worm!

Now it's time to create the worm, which is made up of three small cylinders that are a different color than the apple. To create the cylinders, follow the same process you used to create the base of the apple: make small rectangles of wadding to create the shapes and then cover them with wool.

To make it look more like a real worm you can add some darker colored stripes. To do this, gently pull apart the wool fibers and roll them between the palms of your hand to form threads, then sew them around your cylinder using a thin needle.

Then, draw the worm's face on one of the three small cylinders. To do this, mark where you plan to put the eyes and mouth, using a thicker needle, and then fill in these areas with darker wool.

3. Put the pieces together

Finally, join the worm with the apple. Choose where you want to place the worm sections on the apple and sew them together.

And that's it, you already have an apple and a terrifying worm in time for Halloween!

If you'd like to learn more about how to create wool art toys and design wool characters from scratch, check out María Filipe Castro's online course Art Toy Creation: Needle Felting Technique.

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