Lots and lots of felting!

Hi everyone!

In this post I will be talking about one of my favorite types of material, felt!

There are two main ways of making felt, wet felting and needle felting.

I like doing needle felting best, because it is very simple and not very time consuming or messy. All you need is some fiber (merino wool is very good) in  a color of your choice, a bit of foam and some needle felting needle. What you do is simply stab the fiber repeatedly with the needle, which are quite special because they have ridges along their sides, to knot the fiber together. They are also very sharp, and accidentally stabbing your fingers is very very painful! The foam is important because this is what you put your fiber on while you are stabbing it so a)you don't make holes in your table and b) you don't snap your needles by bashing them on a solid surface! After a bit you will have noticed that the fiber will have shrunk slightly, and will be harder. Keep going and soon you will have a lovely,soft bit of felt. You can make all sorts of things with needle felting by wrapping the fiber around itself then felting it to make a nice ball shape, and you can attach felt to other things using needle felting. I have made a family of four penguins just using needle felting, hopefully I will be able to post a picture of them soon!

Wet felting is very different to needle felting. Instead of using a needle, you just submerge the fiber in hot soapy water and rub it vigorously. This is very tiring and you often need more than one person for a bigger project! One of the disadvantages of wet felting is that you can only make flat shapes. Recently I made a nuno felt scarf(pictured top right). Nuno means 'onto cloth' in japanese, because I was felting decorative bits of fiber onto  a scarf-size bit of net. It was very tiring and I had to have another person helping me! 

Another way of wet felting is knitting an object,like a hat, several sizes too big and then putting it the washing machine to felt it. I have not tried this yet but I am hoping to make a nice pair of slippers that I saw in a book with this method.

Bye for now!