THE EMBELLISHER

A friend and her mom donated this amazing machine to the shop yesterday and i eagerly unboxed it, completely unaware…no knobs? no controls? What is this expensive looking over-simplicity?

Behold! The Embellisher; a babylock felting machine, made and sold between 2008-2018… a bobbinless, threadless, 10 needle fiber enmeshing machine, using purely hand control for feeding in any direction and strictly needle impacting to drive fibers together and attach!

For years ive been repairing wool holes with a hand felting needle and roving, how did i never see this? i surely would have thought i needed one!?

where have i been?

look at this! those fibers are literally stuck together thru impact! this particular machine has an awesome feature where you can draw thread or yarn into a tunnel that leads right into the center of the circle of needles so as you pull it it will stitch that yarn down. but you could also use it without the yarn to felt roving or other woolen pieces together. so this machine IS made for embellishing but also great for repairs!

when you have the yarn installed, you can draw and pull the fabric in any direction. the slower you go, the more impact the needles have and the more felted it becomes.

heres a pic of the back! as far as washing goes, in my experience with the hand felting for repairs in wool it works pretty good but also when you wash it, it might peel back around the edges so I always give the person who I do the repair for a small hand needle and foam so they can reintegrate the fibers as needed in the future. I assume that this may need that type of extra attention but also curious to know if it's possible to just really push those fibers together so well on the machine that it wouldn't need future repairs.