Home Made Felt

These are my three recent tries at felt making. Overall I am happy with them  and I learned a lot about the process of making felt. The actual method of making felt is simple enough, get the wool wet and agitate. That does not indicate the amount of physical effort that must be applied however.On my first attempt I just tossed some globs of wool and llama fiber in the bottom of a plastic tub with hot soapy water and started smooshing them around. I did eventually felt them together.

As to making something useful, no, I did not. To make a piece of nice more or less flat ,smooth felt, a different method is needed. After doing fifteen minutes of extensive research (goggle!), I went back for another try. First off, separate out the fiber and lay them out in a thin layer the size you want. Now, make another thin layer, laid across the direction of the first layer. I built up six or seven layers until I had a pile about six inches thick as it lay.

You can get a rough estimate of how thick your finished piece will be by pressing down on the pile with your hand. This pile ended up making a piece of felt about 3/8 of an inch thick. I don't know if more work would have produced a thinner, and thus denser, finished piece or if that is a function of what type of fiber is used. My thinner pile of three layers made a piece about 1/8 of a inch thick. The three I have made thus far are all alternate layers of wool and then llama fiber.

After the fiber pile is as thick as it is wanted, wet it with very hot, soapy, water, but not too much. You want the fiber uniformly wet but with little excess water. Take my word for it, too much water will prevent the wool from forming a nice uniform layer. As you can see, this will shrink you pile down to a thin layer. I flattened it by patting it and pressing it down with my hands and continued until it starts to form a cohesive layer. It is still fuzzy and stuck to my rough hands when I pressed it.

At that point it is still a long ways from felt but it stuck together enough to slide it onto a sheet of plastic. Then I rolled it up like a jelly roll and slid heavy rubber bands around it every couple inches. I saw several sites on the web that used bubble wrap for this but I didn't have any so couldn't  try that. After my first try I placed the pile of fiber on the plastic to start with. I am not sure if you would really need the rubber bands but it made it easy to keep it all rolled up.

Now the work part started. While putting enough downward pressure to flatten the roll a bit, I rolled it back and forth. I moved my hands from end to end as I went so that all parts were getting the same treatment. It is easy but gets tiring after a while. I switched and used my foot to roll it back and forth for a while. After about 15 minutes of rolling I stopped and took a peek. Not bad, but I thought I could do a little better. I gave it about 5 more minutes of rolling.

Here it is. The pile of fiber covered the tray so you can see how much shrinkage there was. The tray is 17 x 25 inches and the usable area of the felt is about 13 x 17 inches.Some areas along the edges did not get tightly felted so I will trim those off. I already have a have dozen projects in mind that will use some of the felt and I have a huge pile of fiber to work with. Ann has put in her order and is planning to make some house slippers with some. I have several ideas on improving my production methods. If anyone out there has experience making felt I'd love to hear from you.