A Little Mention That Meant Such a Lot

For the past several months, I’ve been quietly learning and practising my needle felting and discovering that I have, in fact, taken to creating 2D needle-felted pictures much more quickly than I anticipated.

As you may or may not know, I have also been documenting the journey on my new Felted Woolly Delights YouTube channel.

With every upload, I did of course wonder if anyone would actually see my videos—whether anybody would find this new little channel of mine.

A week ago today, my subscriber count sat at 20. But on Sunday morning, something unusual began to happen.

On Saturday 1 August 2026, I had uploaded a new video—a video, by the way, which had taken me four hours to edit! I was very pleased with the result, but it was a little different from my previous videos.

Sunday morning arrived. I checked my phone and two people had watched it.

Disappointed I was, but YouTube is a marathon rather than a sprint for the majority of us.

However, by mid-morning I had five new subscribers. Five minutes later, another three appeared. One minute later—and I was checking every minute at this point—there were three more.

Well, my time and effort had been worthwhile, it seemed. Wahoooo!

But then I noticed something a little odd.

My subscriber count was increasing, but the views on my new video were not.

Could this just be a YouTube glitch?

Hmmmm…

I sat down with a cup of tea and my phone in hand, intending to investigate a little further. However, I was soon distracted when I spotted that one of my favourite YouTubers, Philippa from Felts by Philippa, had uploaded a new video.

Philippa has amassed quite a following during her years on YouTube and is a firm favourite with many crafters.

Perfect timing!

I made myself comfortable, sipped my tea and pressed play.

It was a lovely video, as it always is. Philippa told us everything she had been getting up to during July—and then she began talking about a lady she had been watching on YouTube recently. Someone fairly new to needle felting.

She explained how much she had been enjoying this lady’s videos.

And then she told everyone who the lady was.

Can you guess?

It was only little old me!

Well, my mouth fell open and my tea went everywhere.

Then it all slowly began to register.

I quickly checked my channel again and, yep, it suddenly made sense.

The number had climbed to 50, then 73, and before long there were 87 people subscribed to my little channel. Even more lovely were the kind comments from people introducing themselves and saying that they had come over after watching Philippa.

It was exciting, slightly terrifying and genuinely quite emotional. I was completely overwhelmed by the sheer generosity of this lovely lady.

And, to top it all off, Philippa said that my videos were the sort you could have playing in the background while you worked, so it felt as though someone was sitting, chatting and felting alongside you.

That meant such a lot because it is exactly what I would love Felted Woolly Delights to become.

Why Philippa’s encouragement felt particularly special

I discovered Felts by Philippa before Christmas, when needle felting was still completely new to me.

Although I have always drawn, painted and made things, I had no idea that there was this whole craft waiting for me. Watching Philippa’s relaxing videos—and her guidance on where to begin—encouraged me to have a go for myself.

That first attempt uncovered a passion I genuinely didn’t know I had.

Since then, I have begun making both 2D needle-felted pictures and 3D sculptures. My framed wool landscapes have started selling through a local shop, which means I have found myself making more and more of them.

I have also begun sharing the very real process of trying to build Felted Woolly Delights around an ordinary working life.

So Philippa didn’t simply mention my channel. In many ways, her videos are part of the reason the channel exists in the first place.

For someone who unknowingly helped me discover needle felting to then find my videos, enjoy them and generously recommend them to her own audience felt like a rather lovely full-circle moment.

If you have recently found Felted Woolly Delights, hello—I’m Justine, and I’m very pleased to meet you. You have arrived while everything is still very much growing and evolving.

I am learning about needle felting, developing my own style, making pieces for the shop and slowly working towards turning this new passion into a proper creative business.

There will be successes, experiments, unfinished projects, occasional mistakes and undoubtedly quite a few distractions along the way - I am so easily distracted!

If you would like to see it all in action, please do pop over to my YouTube channel and join the growing community there—or join the Woolly Loop through the email sign-up on my homepage so you can stay up to date with all the latest Woolly news.

Thank you so much to Philippa for such an extraordinarily generous mention, for inspiring me to try needle felting in the first place and for sending so many lovely people in my direction.

And thank you to every person who visited, subscribed or left a comment.

I know that 87 subscribers may seem like a tiny number in the enormous world of YouTube, but to me, every one of those subscribers is a real person who has chosen to come along for this new creative journey.

That makes it feel anything but small.

I hope you will make yourself comfortable, pick up whatever you are working on - or not, as the case may be - and stick around.

I am very much looking forward to sharing what happens next.