Needle Felting Travel Case
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This post was last edited/updated in March 2021.
With the holidays coming up, many of you will be travelling out of town and away from the comforts of home sweet home for a day or even several days. Unfortunately, if you’re flying you’ll need to check your bag if you want to bring your kit/case, which I’ll get to in a minute, because us crafty people might be tempted to get a bit too stabby with the passengers (only kidding… maybe…). Or at least that’s what TSA seems to think. Update: nope, it's fine! Of course, your milage may vary, but I actually tested this out, and I had no issue flying with my kit and needles in either direction of my trip. I have proof, and I share my photos at the end of the post. BUT if you’re doing it the old fashioned way of loading up the car and trekking a few towns or states over, then you only need to worry about not getting too stabby with the other occupants of the automobile. Not sure what the rules are with buses and trains, you’d need to looks those up.
How some of us might feel by the time we head home - Crabby AND Stabby
Tongue-in-cheek humor aside, you’ll also likely be thinking about how you might be able to bring your projects along with you. Knitters and crocheters have travel project bags. As do those who do blackwork, cross stitch, embroidery, english paper piecing, hand quilting, applique/wool applique… even spinners have travel wheels (one of which I’m hoping to get under the tree myself). Update: I did get one! Maybe I'll write about it at some point. Fret not, here are some ideas as to how you can bring your felting projects along with you as well.
Granted, you won’t be able to bring along your entire fiber stash, especially if you’ve been felting long enough to take over an entire room of your home. But these are great options especially for 2D felting projects or even tiny 3D ones (maybe you’ll make a tiny little ornament as a host/ess thank you gift). And they’re not just for the holidays! Here are a few other times these travel kits might come in handy:
Any sort of family-gathering that involves hanging out together in a dwelling - why not bring an extra?
Meeting up with a needle felting group
Needle felting en plain air, just like artists have done for centuries
Bring it to the office to work on projects during lunch (or whenever if your job involves a lot of sitting and waiting doing nothing)
At the library while your kids pick out books
At the playground while your kids are playing
Anywhere you have to wait for a while (DMV, car inspection, doctor’s office, ER…)
what do I suggest you pack in your kit?
This depends on your needle felting needs, of course, but the basics would be:
- Felting Needles - Make sure you bring a few spares in case they break.
- Felting Mat - If you only have one needle felting foam, this is where I would suggest bringing a cheaper option, like a sponge cut down to size or some packing foam you saved. You can even bring a felting brush, but that will add some weight to your kit.
- Wool - here’s where you have to do a bit of planning ahead. After all, you are limited in what you can fit. These kits are really better suited for wool painting, especially since flat items take up less space. However, if you pick one of the larger cases, you can make room for the core wool you’ll need for 3D felting. You probably won't need a ton, since you'll be limited to making tiny things with your kit. For 3D, I'd recommend 50% of the wool you bring to be core, and the rest are your colors.
- Bandaids - Welly's bandages come in a cute little travel case of their own, and these Handy Bandies are especially made for fingers and toes. You don't need to fit it in the same container as your wool kit, but make sure you pack some as well.
- Poly Document Pouches - You will need a way to carry your project with you. You don't want to simply toss them in your bag. There's always the risk of lint, crumbs, or even accidental spills from anything else you may have in your bag, and these will keep your work safe. It's a great way to safely store your work at home, too. Of course, plastic food storage bags are also an option, and you probably already have some at home.
Anyway, here are some of my project cases, as well as a few other suggestions on what you can use. This first one is the smallest, and easily fits in my purse.
This is a vintage gilded tin that I picked up at a thrift store a while back. I enjoy collecting and repurposing tins for storage around the house, so that wasn’t my original intention when I found this beauty, but something about it made me think to try turning it into a travel case. And so I did!
It’s around 2 inches deep, so it would fit a standard needle felting foam if you cut it down, however I chose to use some scrap packing foam. In fact, right now, as your Black Friday steals start coming in, and later when you and others are opening up gifts, keep your eye out for packing foam you’d be able to use for this purpose. It does wear down faster than the foam you buy for felting, but it didn’t cost you a dime, and you can spare your big foam from being cut up. The 3x5 felting brushes some people use would also fit in something this size. To keep the needles from knocking around the tin and possibly getting damaged (or any accidental stabbings), I just stick them in one end of the foam. Pen tools come with a cap, or if you use needles without anything on them, you can also use bead tubes to store them. The rest of the tin gets stuffed with wooly bits and a small square of felt.
Because it fits in my everyday bag, this felting tin has come in quite handy, both when having to wait to get my car inspected (because I have to bring my kids along, we walk over to the BK with a playground next to the shop where I felt while they play) or even to make a simple demonstration/allow others to try when explaining needle felting to someone completely new to it. That happened to me at the cash register at a fabric store when the cashier asked me why I was buying so much felt, LOL!
If there’s anything TSA might question, it would be a tin like this one - they will want you take it out of the bag and open it because chances are, they can’t see through it on the scanner. So if you’re planning to fly, leave your fancy tin at home and opt for one of the clear, plastic options below.
For those of you who want to work on projects that might require more wool, rather than something small just to keep yourself busy, this next case will do the trick.
This case is amazing, and it doesn’t break the bank. If you’re lucky enough to have a Harbor Freight nearby, go and check it out (this is something they’ve carried for a number of years, and I imagine they plan to continue carrying it for a while longer). Amazon carries the same case (different brand, either one is a knock off of the Dewalt case), which may be a better deal than Harbor Freight’s because you get a set of four - that way you get one for your travel case (or two, since two different sizes) and two other ones for organizing other parts around the house. Or just use them all to help you organize your projects, but keep the foam separate? I use one of the big ones as our battery storage box. Just like everything else in their store, it’s a knock-off a brand name case at less than half the cost. This particular case is the medium 20 bin one - at first I thought it might be too shallow to fit a 2 inch foam, but it fit in there perfectly. If you do need a deeper case, there is a large 8 bin case for a few dollars more, and if you wanted a smaller travel kit like the one I showed above but can’t find any good containers for it, there’s a small 15 bin case that’s basically the the same as this one except cut in half width-wise. The bins inside are configurable, so you can decide which ones to take out and which ones to keep depending on your needs, and the lid has notches in it to keep the bins in place instead of sliding all over the box inside. And the handle, dare I say, is quite handy.
Here I’m showing you one of the many ways you can configure the bins. On the top right I have an 8x10x2 felting foam (just a little smushed in). Remember that packing foam I mentioned earlier? Same idea here, except it’s cut to fit one of the big bins and used to transport my needles, since there isn’t enough room to stab it in the side of the foam. The smaller bins can be used to sort wool bits of various colors - especially handy for plein air felting where you need small amounts of various shades to get the colors right. If you are working on a specific project with a limited color palette, but more of those colors are needed, switch to the larger bins. I placed two bins on top of the foam to show you that you could also cut the foam down a bit more if you needed more bin space. If are okay with carrying your foam separately, feel free to use all the bins, or even try taking some out (thanks to the lid that helps keep them from shifting) so you have a decent amount of space for core wool.
Bonus tip: for those of you who teach classes and have a bit of expendable income, you can get one bin for each student (not for them to keep of course, unless you want to figure that into the cost, maybe for a series of classes) and set them all up with the foam, needles and wool that they will need for the class. Strap them all on a dolly/cart and wheel them into class - at the end of the class they take their items home and you have your cases to set up for the next class.
I also wanted to share the storage a friend of mine, Gail from Feathertree Felt, uses when she goes to meet up with her needle felting group.
She said she found these on clearance at Michaels as a set of three, and it looks like there are plenty of storage places in the large one (24 if I counted correctly) for a nice-sized palette of colors. While you can’t rearrange the spaces themselves, you can take out the dividers if you needed to as she has in the photo below.
In case you can't find these at Michaels, there are similar cases available here, which looks like you can remove some of the dividers to some degree.
Wool painting by Gail Roberts Loveland
Above is one of her works in progress that she’s been working on the go. Don’t you just love the little flowers peeking out from under the case?
Photo from Nancy Palmer - follow her on Instagram
The one above was recently shared with me by Nancy Palmer (a new felting friend I made through the Crafty as Heck discord server) is from a repurposed vintage suitcase. She wrote “I finished my vintage suitcase makeover! There is a piece of metal under that top fabric so I could put rare earth magnets on the backs of tins and tools and just stick them up there. I can take them in or out as needed for projects. I do need to add an awl up there.” I absolutely love it, and now I really want to find a vintage suitcase myself… Luckily for me, seems there are many to choose from over on Etsy!
The one above was recently shared with me by Nancy Palmer (a new felting friend I made through the Crafty as Heck discord server) is from a repurposed vintage suitcase. She wrote “I finished my vintage suitcase makeover! There is a piece of metal under that top fabric so I could put rare earth magnets on the backs of tins and tools and just stick them up there. I can take them in or out as needed for projects. I do need to add an awl up there.” I absolutely love it, and now I really want to find a vintage suitcase myself…
Some of you might remember this next one…
I haven’t used this for needle felting, but I really wanted to include this for those of us who are still 80’s/90’s kids at heart and remember all the rage of Caboodles. Even if you weren’t into make-up, I don’t know of anyone who didn’t beg their parents for a caboodles box to store whatever magical trinkets you wanted to carry. In fact, I remember in 5th and 6th grades, my friends and I all had our own mini caboodles boxes for all our special tiny trinkets - things like jax, polly pockets, lip gloss (“mooom, it’s not lipstick it’s like lip balm”), and whatever our versions of fidgets were at the time. You can still get them, and you can absolutely try using one for your needle felting supplies. This is to treat your inner child - how else would you carry your kawaii felts (Japanese for cute/adorable, not the island which is spelled Kaua’i)?
In an effort to include a less cutesy box option for a caboodle-style container by searching for a tackle box, I came across this wonder. Now this is a travel case! It’s 4” deep according to the comments, and there are two sides. Meaning you could either carry far more wool for one project, or have the wool for two separate projects on either side. And there’s more than enough room to carry your felting base. I really like the look of this box! I really don’t need any more boxes.
So keep your eyes peeled for some storage ideas, and check a couple of different places for storage ideas, like thrift stores, craft stores, home improvement/construction, discount retailers that sell odds & ends (like Big Lots, Homegoods or Tuesday Morning type stores) while you’re out crossing off your holiday shopping list. If you find any neat travel cases that weren’t mentioned here (maybe something one-of-a-kind like a tiny vintage suitcase?) please share them in my Facebook group! If I get enough submissions I’ll make a new post sharing all the cool inventive ways that all you creative people come up with to travel with your work.
I passed through TSA just fine and was waiting at the gate - if you look closely towards the “top” of the case (oriented in the photo), you can see my needles with the polymer handles loose in one of the compartments.
As promised, above is my proof-of-travel photo with my kit. Sorry for the meh quality - I was tired, a bit stressed out trying to get through the check-in process, and it was quite late if I remember correctly, so was thinking more “get photo of proof” and less “stage it perfectly” (I want to say around 10pm?). We figured the kids would sleep better on the flight after a long day. Bonus photo below of my son holding his needle felted ampersand with rare selfie of myself (blurry because he was waving it around).
We actually travel very rarely, and usually my folks come up to visit us every year, but my dad had surgery a few months prior and invited us to come visit them instead. This was November 2019, just months before Covid-19 and the start of our 1-year-plus-life-in-self-isolation. My son sat with me on the flight there (my daughter with her dad), and here he is waving his needle felted ampersand buddy that he brought with him (we switched kids on the flight back).