A badger for a bag

There is a club whose mascot is a badger wearing a yellow scarf. It transpires that, for a number of very practical reasons, the female members of this club all have very similar handbags and, as a result, I was asked by one of the members to create something that she could attach to her bag to make it a little more distinct. After all, it's no good arriving home, sticking your hand into your bag to retrieve your door keys, to find that you've accidentally picked up someone else's. Chances are you would also be missing your mobile phone, probably all your phone numbers, and any means to pay for a locksmith.

A badger seemed like the obvious adornment and, indeed, what had been requested. And so it was that I sat down for this month's craft club with a very particular mission.

It has been a while since I needle-felted anything three-dimensional. My first attempts had been rather tiny key rings but knowing how hard detail is to create in miniature I decided to go a bit bigger this time.

Earlier key rings for a couple of newly-weds...

...and for my rhino-collecting friend

For a whisky-loving Dad

And perhaps my most ambitious project to date - yes, it's tiny!

Fortunately I had a good source of inspiration from a book of British mammals. I've had it for years but had only unearthed the other weekend when I was having a clear out. Not only did it have a family of badgers on the cover but four pages inside with lots of different and very beautiful illustrations of this elusive creature (sadly, I've never seen one in the flesh - and alive - just on television or squished by the side of the road).

Anyway, I began by making a simple cylinder for the body and a ball for the head, always leaving loose fibres at one end so that they could be felted together.  Then came four small, relatively flat cylinders for the legs, again with loose fibres at one end to aid attachment. These were all in black. I then took a blend of cream and light grey to make a tail, in a similar fashion to the legs, but much smaller; and then two tiny black ears, each backed with an even smaller bit of white.  All these were felted together and worked with the barbed needle to get the right overall shape before adding elements of white and light grey to give the animal its distinctive markings. Initially my fellow crafters seemed surprised to see me adding grey as people often think of badgers as being black and white but my trusty field guide assured me otherwise.

I was quite pleased with the final result, the yellow scarf enabling me to securely fix in place a keyring so that it could be attached to the handbag and, hopefully, make it easily recognisable.