Wool Felting - by Hand

Wool Felt by Hand

One of the best things about wool felting by hand is that you have full control over the felting process - start, check, stop, redo. On the other hand it does take more elbow grease (or opportunity for an exercise). It is ideal for felting up a swatch sample (which can only give you an idea of how the yarn felts and not so much about shrinkage if you are going to use a washing machine for the final project). Furthermore, this really is essential knowledge in felting because there may be times when, even if you are felting by washing machine, you might have to/want to finish the last final felting process by hand.

Materials

• container: bucket, bath tub, sink, or bucket ~ pending on the size of your project. Large enough to fully submerge your piece and to allow for vigorous agitation/swishing.
• soap - mild laundry detergent, or baking soda, or mild shampoo, or dish soap
• hot and cold water. Good idea to have a source of hot water available (e.g. boiling pot, hot hot water from tap, kettle) as you will be topping up quite a bit.
• your hands - or some other agitator helper
• rubber gloves (to protect your hands from hot water. Rough/ribbed rubber gloves also help increase agitation and improve felting)

Felting Process

1. Fill container with enough Hot water to cover piece to be felted as well as when you will be vigorously swishing/agitating it around.
   I cannot stress the vigorous enough. You really have to put some energy into this. Just gently swishing pieces around will not do.
2. Add the few drops of detergent. So few that you hardly see any suds.
3. Use gloved hands, or stick to roughly move your piece around. Rubbing with knuckles or along the bottom and sides of container will help with the agitation process.
4. After a few minutes, take it out and squeeze (not wring) out excess water, lay flat (on towel) and check.
5. When it is out of the water, you can also rub it with your hands. With your ribbed gloved hands, rubbing the piece between you hands in circular motion, clockwise and anti-clockwise seems to help the best. Rub occasionally length and width-wise between your hands. I find that if you run one gloved finger lightly over your piece of soap, smear it on your piece and continue rubbing between your hands, that seems to help as well.
6. If piece is still not felting well, shock with a plunge into cold water.
7. Squeeze out excess water and repeat the hot water-agitation process (Refill/top up/replace with hot water if you feel water is getting too cold. Pour out some of the cooling hot water and replace with fresh hot water so that it does not take more and more new hot water to keep the water at a high temperature.)
8. Continue this way till you are happy that the piece has felted to your satisfaction.
9. Plunge and rinse one last time in Cold water.
10. When thoroughly rinsed of soap, again squeeze as much water out as possible. No wringing.
11. Roll up in some thick toweling to absorb even more water. Do this again if you have to.
12. When you have gotten out as much water as you can, it is time to dry it.
13. Flat pieces of work, you can stretch and block for drying.
    For shaped pieces, reshape it. Use anything appropriate to its shape ~ bowl for round shapes, blocks or books for rectangles, or stuff it with something that will help define its shape during drying.
    Let it dry, reshaping or turning it inside out once in a while if appropriate.
    Depending on your climate and the project, the amount of drying time will vary.