Want to add an opalescent, shimmering look to your needle felted (or wet felted) projects using only wool? If you’ve ever wanted to capture the metallic appearance of a peacock, a swallow, a starling, or perhaps a fish using wool, then I have a selection of wool roving colors I think you’ll love working with!
While much of the wool roving in my shop has a variegated or heathered appearance, each color is usually made up of other similar colors in nearby hues or color families. For example, Pink Grapefruit is a color which overall appears coral pink, but is actually made up of pink, orange, peach, and yellow fibers.
The quality about the opalescent or metallic colors that makes them special is that from a distance they contain enough of one hue to appear as the color they are named as; but upon closer inspection, they are actually made up of a virtual rainbow of fibers from very different color families. For now, I’m going to focus on the two of these colors that I used to make this starling portrait. But I’ll provide a list of the others so you can check them out for yourself!
For this starling, I used Licorice Snap wool roving over the entire head, and then I layered Blue Goldstone wool roving over the front portion of the head where the face is. I then applied the starry dots and dashes in Warm White and Celadon green.
Here is the Blue Goldstone roving alone. As you can see, it has an overall appearance of a midnight blue, but is actually made up of many different colors including several shades of blue, a couple of greens, yellow, and purple. This opalescent midnight blue would also look lovely as part of felted celestial or night sky piece…
And here is Licorice Snap, a beautiful rainbow black. This roving has black as its main component, and then contains a range of hues similar to the Blue Goldstone. It’s a really lovely alternative to a black or charcoal when you want a bit of shimmer or extra depth in your felted surface.
For your reference, her are the other opalescent colors I offer: Moonstone, Autumn Jasper, River Stone, and Brown Opal.
Happy crafting, friends!