Felt making part one

Making felt is really easy and lots of fun. There are two kinds of felt making: needle felting and wet felting. Needle felting involves using needles to tangle wool fibres to make felt and wet felting uses warm water soap and a rubbing action to do the same thing. This is the best method to use with small children and I am posting a simplified way of making felt that makes it suitable for doing with small people. It probably isn’t the best felt in the world, but you can still use it to make lots of things.

Today I’m going to show you how we make felt balls.

You will need:

Warm soapy water

Combed tops. This is wool that has been washed and dyed and combed but it has not been spun. It usually comes in a loose sausage of wool. A good craft shop is hard to find these days, look online for your nearest one or find an online supplier.

To make a ball cut three or four centimetres off your sausage of wool and rip it up so you have a small cloud of wool with fibres going in all directions. If you would like to mix different colours of wool together to give interesting patterns.

Now dip your cloud of wool in the bowl of warm soapy water (we just put in a very small squirt of dishwashing liquid).

Roll the ball of wool in your hands, just like you would if you were making a ball of clay. Keep going until it feels quite hard and all the fibres have tangled together. Give your ball a quick rinse under the cold tap to get rid of the soap and leave to dry.

After all that you have made some very cute felt balls. They came out about one and a half to two and half centimetres each. What shall we do with them? You might have to wait a while to find out but we will make them in to something. Have you got any ideas?

Welt felting is a very tactile process. My son (who is seven) really enjoyed mixing different colours of wool together and liked the lustre of the wool. He was also thinking about it’s physical properties. He said “It’s so light you don’t know it is on your hand except by looking at it.”

My daughter, who is two years old, took the task enthusiastically. Her felt pieces didn’t really come out as balls and she called them her “fossils”. Even though they are not spherical I am sure we can still incorporate them in to a larger project. These activities are not really about the end results. It’s the process and exploring different materials that counts!

Here are some that I made just to give you an idea of what you can do. They are quite dense and nearly spherical.