Felting

What is felting?

Essentially, felting is making fabric or shapes out of loose wool. My understanding is that wool fibers are fairly scaly under a microscope, and felting is basically pushing them together until all those scales catch tightly on each other.

Felting comes in two broad categories: wet felting and needle felting

Wet felting uses water, soap, and agitation to bind the wool fibers together. If you've ever heard of someone 'shrinking' a sweater in the washing machine? That's wet felting. The wool fibers bind tighter and tighter together until there's just no room left to move. When done on purpose, you can get a really sturdy and dense wool cloth (flat), or shapes like balls (think dryer balls or wool beads)

Needle felting uses needles with sort of barbed tips to push dry wool fibers tightly up against each other. This lets you have very precise control of where fibers end up, so if you see little pictures of houses and countryside and delicate little flowers made of wool felt, it was likely needle felted.

Living Felt has some great tutorial videos for all kinds of felting! Here's their YouTube channel if you find that easier to navigate.

Classes and Projects

June 2024 - Basic flat felting

This class was taught at the Contemporary Handweavers of Houston by one of our members, Dee Dee Woodbury. We walked through the process of making a couple of pieces of felt, using a few different techniques for laying out, wetting, felting, and fulling the project.

The first piece was done by laying out wool roving in layers. Each layer is 90 degrees to the one below it, kind of like making lasagna. For this one, I just used a solid color, though most of the class got more creative and went with multiple colors to see how they blend together.

To make the felt, we got everything good and wet and soapy, then rolled it in a bamboo sushin mat - about 25 rolls one way, turn the wool a quarter turn, another 25 rolls, quarter turn, repeat, until the whole thing was holding together. (Seriously, don't try to do this from my instructions; go watch a video)

After a lot of rolling and turning and rolling and turning I got bored before my piece was fully felted. It holds together as fabric, but it's still very fuzzy.

After lunch, for our second piece, we started with white wool batt as our base instead of roving. I sandwiched in one layer of blue roving, which gave the impression of a sunny sky with wispy clouds. Rolling with the theme, I did some loose finger-spinning with some yellow roving and laid down a sort of sunny spiral - it isn't meant to look like anything, just to add some color and movement.

Then we were back to the rolling and turning and rolling and turning, which got dull very fast.

But then - oh! yes! - Dee Dee pulled out washboard for me to try. That was awesome! Get everything wet and soapy and then rub aggressively against the textured glass surface, turning the piece every so often. That went much faster than the rolling! In no time flat, I had a finished piece of felt that had no stretch left in it.

So then we rinsed out all the soap and gave the pieces a dip in a vinegar water solution, and laid them out to dry.