We felted - and we felt it

I was going to be such a good blogger these school holidays and post every day and now - look almost a week gone and still no blogging.

On Thursday a bunch of us craftsters got together to have a go at a big wet felting project !.

Pouring rain meant the project was indoors with 8 women a truckload of kids, bamboo blinds, natural fleece, dyed fleece , muffins, chocolate cake, quiche, pastries, pie, sponge cake and lots of cups of tea.

This was a very hands on day and one of the gorgeous kids took the photos for us .

Here we go laying out all the wool fibres onto some bubble wrap. I forgot to get photos of my project at this early stage so this is Annie's project. We then wet it all down with warm soapy water and gave it a little massage. After that it was bubble wrap on top and roll it up into the bamboo blinds to start rollin'

200 times, then a quarter turn of the prefelt, 200 times quarter turn etc etc - you get the picture. Of course on the long side we had to use two blinds . This really got a sweat up I can tell you and it took a long long time....

We rotated stations around the bench and even got the kids in to have a go - or ten.

This is called a prefelt- it is very very thin and has started to all hold together but is not fully felted. (I have to add here we had never done this before so we were kind of winging it).Once we were happy with this piece we then cut / tore / eased it apart into strips and we also eased open any thin bits because I wanted holes in the strips.

This is Sue ! and on the inside she is waving madly to her sister Anne in Hong Kong . Hi Anne !!!!!

We then laid the prefelt strips onto black tissue silk and began the felting process all over again. This time we used cold water as we didn't want too much shrinkage until the wool fibres had grabbed onto the silk. Then it was back to the endless rolling - we eventually moved to the floor where we rolled the big long roll with our feet.

Once the felt had started to migrate (straight from the instructions that word ) into the silk we could go a bit faster by heating up the whole thing in the microwave.... then you guessed it - a bit more rolling.


The last step was fun- 2 min in the microwave then throw it on the bench 100 times, back in the microwave and more throwing. This shocks the fibres ! Eventually it just works and ......Voila!!!!

This was one of the big projects but we all had a dabble with smaller more manageable ones throughout the day - I'll pop some pics up tomorrow before this post becomes as long as the felting day did !