Simplicity's Electric Hand Felting Machine- Product Review

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey it's Vanessa The Crafty Gemini today I'm back with a new video product review for you this time it's on simplicity's brand spanking new electric hand felting machine now the last time I did a product review on a felting machine you may recall it was for simplicity's 12 needle Deluxe felting machine now that had more of a wider and bigger body it was more like a sewing machine type body right so it required a little bit more space and I know not everybody has that space now if you're someone who has a very small crafting area and you have to minimize the amount of machines and little gadgets that you get you definitely want to watch the rest of this review because this new electrican felting machine is just this big now in order to use the product correctly you do need some felting foam and our very generous friends at Simplicity have provided us a machine and a felting foam to give away to one of you lucky viewers out there so a big thanks to Simplicity and this is what one of you lucky winners will be winning your own electrican felting machine and a block of felting foam now let me jump right into the product review so you can see what this little machine is all about so the machine comes in a little box like this okay it has a little handle on it and what you're going to get is a little machine like this before I plug it up let's go over the actual little hand felting machine itself so the body looks just like this it comes in pink it has an on andof switch right up top here's the little plug part to plug up to the wall and then it has a stand down here as well when we get to the needle part here you will see if you look closely in there you can't see it on camera but there's a little spring that allows this to go back and forth up and down which is what you're doing when you start felting with it okay inside here there's six Barb needles okay so in comparison to the 12 needle felting machine this one only has six this clear part here is a needle guard you can see it's nice and wide and when you're using it you can actually be holding pieces right out here without running the risk of running your finger underneath you have about a half of an inch clearance all the way around as well now there's a spring in there that allows us to go up and down so that the needles can come down when you're felting if you do need to change your needles here's one thing I noticed do not do it while it's plugged in because you're going to have to flip it like this to access it with the little allen wrench that comes with the machine it also comes inside the box you'll get a pair of tweezers okay this allows you to even get up closer if you don't feel confident say holding down your pieces of fiber down here when you're working you can definitely do it by holding it down with the tweezer so you can get nice and close to your project pieces then it also comes here with two Allen wrenches the long side of the Allen wrench you put right in the middle and this is when you're changing out your needles or if you wanted to minimize the number right let's say you're working on very fine detail project you may only want to use one or two of the needles so you can do this in order to remove the other four right so you'll just turn this until you take out the little screw it comes out right on the Allen wrench like that and then to remove the needles it's not recommend that you tip them out like that because you can bend them up by the needles dropping on your work surface so instead just grab your tweezers and just pull them out like this now if you look real closely on each one of the sides here for each needle there is a little opening for you to use the smaller allen wrench so you would just turn them out if you wanted to remove some or if you were replacing them now it is very important that you only service anything in this needle area when the device is completely unplugged the reason I say that is that if you do have it plugged in and you go to service this area here because the on andof switch is down here you can buy mistake okay turn it on and then when you go to service this this can be very dangerous by you pushing this down is going to expose the needles okay so I mean it's kind of problematic in that sense but if you make sure that you have your device unplugged you're not going to have a problem so my device is plugged in and it's set to off now I do want to note that the stand area back here you see how the device comes down a little bit both in the front and the back if I push the stand all the way back you don't want that okay because since the needle area here is spring activated you're causing those needles to come down like right now I see them I'm barely touching my rotary cutting mat and I don't want that I don't want the needles to be exposed but I'll just put it straight up and down so that it's pretty much level with the bottom of my needle guard area now let's check out how the device Works remember the on andof switch if you forget which symbol means what when you turn it on the red light comes out so that's real simple so let me show you how the machine works I'm just going to do some wool roving here just to give you a sample just pull your fiber whatever it is you're working with and and what I like is that you can create Standalone embellishments because we're using the foam as our backdrop right you can layer your pieces here make flowers that have multiple layers of petals and then once you're done with the embellishment piece you just peel it off of here okay because it's not going to stay stuck to the foam you would just peel it back and then you can apply whatever your finished embellishment is directly onto your project so it's really cool that you don't have to work directly on the project or on a background but instead you can just do it right on on the felting foam in layers all right so I have a few layers there some different colored uh wool roving and now we're just going to start felting notice you can go up and down once you come up the machine stops without you having to turn the on and off button on or off or you can compress it all the way down and just make your way around your project if you're wondering about the felting foam block the reason we're using this is so that when we use the device and our six Barb needles that you can see there okay as they're coming down onto the fibers we want them to interlock the fibers but we don't want to stick it to anything else unless we're working on our background piece so the felting foam allows the needles to go through the foam pushing through the fibers all the way to the foam but then you can simply peel this off so we have this felting foam to allow us that cushion and to give us a work surface for our felted projects and that's my take on simplicity's new electric hand felting machine now to enter the giveaway it's real simple all you got to do is subscribe to my channel and leave me a comment here underneath this video on YouTube letting me know why you deserve to win simplicity's new electrican felting machine\n"