Name: Distelfink Felted Wool Brooch
Brand: Carding House Co
SKU: CHC-BRC-F-010
Price: 24.00 USD
Availability: InStock

Distelfink Felted Wool Brooch

$24.00 USD

100% New Zealand Wool
Open pasture, naturally soft, cleanly spun, and extraordinarily resilient.
Individually Hand-Sculpted
Wet-felted and needle-detailed so no two pieces are identical.
Naturally Fresh & Durable
Breathable, odor-resistant, and easy to spot clean.

Description

A songbird of no particular species, which is the point.

Black hood and beak, a white crescent curving under a glass bead eye, a breast of hot marigold orange, and then the wing and tail in deep blue — every single feather outlined in a fine cream line.

That outline is doing two jobs at once. It separates each feather from the one beside it, so a block of blue reads as a folded wing instead of a blue shape. And it lifts the whole wing clear of the orange body underneath. Take the cream away and the bird collapses into three flat colours.

The feathers are graduated too — short at the shoulder, longer toward the tail, the way a folded wing actually stacks. The tail is two broad blue feathers with pale streaks running down the centre of each.

One olive-green oval sits at the shoulder. It is the only colour on the bird that appears once, and it is what stops the whole thing being orange, black and blue.

The shape follows the distelfink — the stylised songbird of Pennsylvania Dutch folk painting, drawn in flat bold colour with every feather picked out, and kept around the house for luck.

A pin bar on the back. Made from New Zealand wool.

New Zealand wool, needle-felted and lightly stuffed.
Applied felted feathers, each outlined in cream roving.
Black glass bead eye.
Metal pin bar bound on with ochre yarn.

Applied felt work, built up in layers on a felted body.
The body is shaped first and lightly stuffed, then the black hood is laid over the orange and worked down so the join between them is a soft gradient rather than a cut line. The white crescent under the eye and the olive shoulder oval go on next, each one a separate piece of wool punched into place.
The feathers are where the hours go. Each blue feather is laid individually, then a fine line of cream roving is run along its edge and felted down. That outline does two separate jobsit divides each feather from its neighbour, so a block of blue reads as a folded wing rather than a blue shape, and it lifts the whole wing clear of the orange body beneath. Remove the cream and the bird falls apart into three flat colours.
The feathers are graduated as well, short at the shoulder and longer toward the tail, which is how a folded wing actually stacks. Worked all the same length they would read as a fan.
The tail is two broad blue feathers with pale streaks let into the centre of each, and the eye is a single black glass bead set into the felt.

Pure New Zealand pasture wool naturally repels dust and light spills thanks to its dense, organic fiber structure.

Wearing itpin through a sturdy layer — wool coating, denim, canvas, a bag strap. The tail projects well past the body, so pin it where it will not be pressed against a seatback or a bag.

The cream outlinesthese are the most delicate part and the first thing to pick up grime, being pale wool against dark. Keep a lint roller away from them; a soft brush worked along the feather, never across it, is safer.

Spot cleaningblot with a barely damp cloth and dry flat, pin side down. Never soak and never machine wash — the blue and the black will both bleed straight into the cream outlines and the white crescent, and that is the whole design gone.

Reshapingif a feather flattens, ease it back up with a fingertip from underneath rather than pulling at the tip.