Felt experiments 

Over the last year or two I have been exploring lots of ways of using felt and felting .  ..we sell all kinds of materials for this in the shop but  I don't get enough time to play with them

I have ruined many many wool jumpers buy accidentally felting them in the washing machine . The saddest example of this was a  beautiful hand knitted jumper designed by my friend  as part of a collection she was selling in Libertys  in London . The jumper was like a magic carpet and was based around Indian miniatures ..it was gorgeous  but sadly a momentary lapse about 20 years ago and it ended up about a quarter of the original size !!..I still miss that jumper

Anyways  now I am  experimenting with making things felt on purpose.   I am waiting to take delivery next week of  a range of yarns that are made for knitting or crocheting  "Filtz" yarns f and its  going to  really good fun. 

Here is a little flower  i made with some red felting yarn. I crocheted a flower and then just washed it .. In the photograph are also some little red  needelfelted hearts  made by pricking in a cookie cutter......I stock hundreds of colours of merino  tops. You just  prick with your needlefelting needle inside the  cookie cutter and hey presto you get a perfectly shaped  bit of  felt

here is  a list of all the ways that you can felt

Wet Wrapping  - using  merino tops - ( those lovely  unspun wool fibres ) you can wrap items such as plastic eggs or other shapes and then tie tightly in a pair of old tights and put in the washing machine..this way you can make hollow objects . You may need to wash twice to make the felt really firm 

Wet felting  - I  tried this on a course and hated it - just made my hands really sore . You use lots of soap and a mat and  basically rub the fibres together using  friction and a  rough mat . You can also make beads etc

Needlefelting  round  fibres. This is the method used to produce all those lovely little creatures etc  We adapted this method during the coral reef project so that we could quickly produce  2d shapes of fish .  here is a turtle that i made and some of the fish we made in the workshops  i delivered.  Most of the people had never done this before

Before Christmas I started to combine needlefelting with felties and here are some little reindeer I made this way

You can also felt around  polystyrene balls and then  embellish them with  beads or sequins or embroidery . I have collected together lots of examples of this on Pinterest. I am currently making some  but not ready to show them yet


You can felt jumpers deliberately ( must be wool) on boil wash in the machine and them  needeleft on top of the felted jumper

Here is a picture of the yarns that you can use to knit or crochet and then felt in the washing machine. I made the bowl one evening.  You can also use wool as long as it is not  superwash as that has been treated not to shrink...These yarns are by Rico and  hold the colour at 60.  IM just waiting now to get some Austermann yarns for the shop and Ill be testing those and sharing in due course

Right  I am off to  play with resin, continue to crochet into some wire hoops and  do a few more rows of my crochet flower rug x