Needle Felted DIY Essential Oil Diffuser Ornament

Here is a really easy and fun Christmas tree ornament you can make (even with some help from kids) that is needle felted and can be used as an essential oil diffuser ornament.

Read the detailed instructions below on how to make a DIY needle felted Christmas tree ornament!

If you’ve never worked with wool fibres before, you can do some pretty amazing things once you learn how to felt. This is a great new craft to try, and this ornament is perfect as one of your first projects when it comes to needle felting. I have felted some wool dryer balls in the past, but the simple technique I used today involves a needle and a cookie-cutter (no use of hot water), instead of using wet felting techniques.

Materials needed to make your own needle felted DIY essential oil diffuser ornament:

• 10 Piece Favorite Holiday Cookie Cutters
• Needle Felting Tools: Starter Kit Wool Felt with 6 Colors Wool Roving Felting Basic Tools Kit including needle felting needles
• WISTYRIA EDITIONS 0.25-Ounce Wool Roving, 12-Inch, Bold, 8-Pack – this pack had the green fiber for this tree ornament
• Pandahall 1 Box Mixed Color 12/0 Glass Seed Beads Transparent Silver-Lined Loose Spacer Mini Glass Seed Beads,
• Star Beads
• Needle and green thread
• Your favorite essential oil – I recommend a Christmas scent like Spruce, Fir Needle, or Frankincense & Myrrh Synergy Blend

To make your festive ornaments, you’ll need to have set of holiday season cookie cutters (link to purchase them is above) that are all different Christmas-themed shapes. Yes, you can use these for Christmas cut-out cookies, but you can also use these shapes to make felted 3D objects in the form of Christmas ornaments!

The needle felting technique used to make these ornaments is easy! You will need to find a flat work surface to work on. First, get out your Styrofoam spongy dense foam block that comes in the needle felting kit and place your cookie cutter on top of that. Fill the Christmas tree cookie cutter with green wool, and then take a single felting needle from your kit and just start poking the wool fibers until it gets flat.

You will poke it with a needle hundreds of times until you get a flat piece of wool. Just use the cookie cutter as your guide combined with your hand-eye coordination and continue using the needle until the fibers of the wool start connecting and meshing together. If you think your tree is too thin, then you can add small pieces of wool on top of the cookie cutter and continue felting until it is thick enough for your liking.

The whole process takes about 10 minutes or so, although people may have an individual felting speed which makes this time just an average. Bottom line, these do not take a long time to make.

The wool fibers will be “felted” together from the needlework and then it will hold its new shape in the form of a Christmas tree!

 

The kit also comes with some leather finger covers. You can wear that if you want so that your index fingers don’t get irritated from pressing down the needle. I found I didn’t need that for this project because I wasn’t spending hours and hours doing this. But if I was to spend that amount of time, then yes, I’d want to wear the leather on my finger.

I also mentioned above that this is a project your kids can help with! My 10-year-old daughter is making these for her friends this year!

Caution before you start making this needle felted ornament with kids:

This project is for older kids though – my oldest did this starting when she was 8. The needles are – well – needles! They are sharp needles and not for young children! And if you or your child are not careful, they can certainly poke right into your skin. So use caution when showing this technique to your kids.

Again, If you’ve never needle felted before, then check out this tutorial video I made on Facebook live on how to get started with needle felting. It’s way easier than you might think!

Once you have one side flat from felting wool, then you need to peel it off of your Styrofoam sponge board and felt the other side. The other side will be flat, but some loose fibres will be sticking out and you’ll just need to neaten it up a bit from being so fuzzy.

Watch the video I linked above – and she shows what I mean about the backside.

Once the tree is formed, you can now decorate it using seed beads, a sewing needle and green thread!

I ran out of green thread, so I actually used 3 strands of green embroidery floss that I had on hand. That works just as well. Then you can add a star bead to the top of your ornament, and leave enough embroidery floss at the top to be able to hang the ornament!

Since the felted wool is a thick fibrous material that works well to hold essential oils, it’s a good idea to make these ornaments multi-functional and turn them into essential oil diffusers as well. I have an artificial tree, so I never get the authentic pine smell in my house each year. But when I have a great smelling pine or fir or spruce or Christmas blend essential oil that I put on these ornaments, it gives my living room the smell like it is a real tree! (and without the mess of falling needles!)

Here is another idea: take a small amount of wool (white) and the snowflake cookie cutter and needle felt a snowflake ornament! When all of the wool fibers are felted together, you can then decorate your snow flake with a few beads if you’d like! You can make all sorts of sweet ornaments using a variety of different shaped cookie cutters!

Once you have mastered these simple needle felted ornaments, it’s time to move on to even more challenging felting projects and experiment with finer needles, different materials, and different types of wool fibers. I have a friend who has made numerous high quality small animals using needle felting. This “Loveable Felted Animals“ book gives you detailed information on how to make them. She has even made her own Nativity scene little felted figurines using needle felting! This truly is an excellent project and art form that you can practice and master over time with more challenging projects. Mastering this simple ornament is just a beginner’s guide to the bast world of needle felting and all you can do with it!

When you are ready to diffuse some essential oil, just add a few drops of your favorite evergreen tree or Christmas blend essential oil right onto the felt! The more felted ornaments with a drop or two of oils, the stronger the scent. You probably need at least 3 ornaments placed around the tree to get a noticeable lingering authentic Christmas aroma. You can give these as gifts this year to a family member, friend, or loved one to decorate their tree. Be sure to add a bottle of essential oils that remind you of Christmas and you have a wonderful homemade gift!

If you are looking for another style of essential oil diffuser ornament – check out this popular Essential Oil Diffuser Christmas Tree Ornament using beads and ribbon!