felting is dangerous business!

"It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to." - Bilbo Baggins


I'll tell you what else is dangerous...felting. It goes without saying that needle felting can be painful, if your aim isn't quite right. But I'm talking about wet felting. You know, when you take some nice, soft, fluffy roving of beautiful colors in your hand and you add soap and water and you knead it around in your hands.... At this point you might be wondering how this could be dangerous. Well, when you COMBINE it with going out your front door...

I'm working on making some stitch markers for knitting. Cute little felted Corriedale sheep wool pendants. And I'm rolling it around in my hands, and I open my front door to check on the water in the garden, and forgot to step down. *POP* goes the ankle. Those of you that have done this before are cringing, am I right?

If only I had listened to Bilbo.

But felting? Seriously? I mean, if you think of the least dangerous thing imaginable and subtract 100, you're left with wet felting.

Hi ho hi ho, its off to the ER I go.

  

twin sammich

This past weekend was the Estes Park Wool Festival. Dana, Deb and myself went. So much fun! All that yarn was almost too much to process. The colors...textures...smells... There were animals as well. Sheep, goat, llama, alpaca, rabbits. The angora rabbit hair is so soft you can't tell you're touching anything. It's incredibly tempting to raise angora rabbits and spin the wool. I actually found myself considering it for a few moments. As well as llama. The vicuña were adorable. Standing around in the pens making whining sounds, because they were standing around in pens, I imagine. The wool from a vicuña is the most incredibly soft and warm wool. My understanding is that they can only be shorn every 3 years. This makes the yarn quite expensive. This also means none of us came home with any vicuña yarn.

...adorable vicuna...

We stayed up late Saturday night giving a go at felting bars of soap. Tiny bars of soap we mooched off our host at the B&B. They turned out lovely. Deborah made an artistic sunflower and Dana a daisy. I made a pasture with a house on a hill. It looked kindof whompy, and I was sure it would fall apart first time in the shower. But it didn't. Although it DOES look like a tornado blew through the field. Going to have to experiment a bit more with those. Needle felting after wet felting seems to work pretty well.

Estes park is beautiful. Surrounded by mountains like a huge hug. We were visited by a couple elk at breakfast, and on the way out of town we saw maybe 8 of them frolicking in the lake. Already looking forward to going next year.

As for now, I'm confined to a boot cast, crutches, and my house. And like the vicuña, perhaps a little bit of whining...

How to make a felted wool ball:

You'll need 3 ingredients:
Wool roving
Soap (any dish soap or hand soap will do)

Water

Begin by separating out the roving, if its roving yarn (image A). If it's already been separated out (see image B), you can get right to it. Decide how large you want the finished ball to be. For roughly a 1" pendant, I use enough roving to make a loose fist around (image C).

Add as much soap to your hands as you would use to wash them. Then wet the roving with hot water, and allow the soap and water to saturate the wool. It will feel like you're kneading it to death (and be sure to not walk out your front door on this step). The agitation and soapy water will begin the felting process. The tiny fibers start to open up and grab onto each other. Rub around in the palm of your hand for about 5 minutes.

Turn the water to cold and while rolling the wool in your hands, begin to apply more pressure. If you're having difficulty getting it to hold together enough to actually ROLL between your hands, there is most likely too much soap preventing the friction to form a ball. Now alternate between rinsing with hot and cold water, all the while rolling between palms and applying more and more pressure.

If you find that there is a spot, or spots, where the wool isn't felting together, you can pick a little at the fibers and stretch them across the gap (image D).

Add a tinge of soap here and there as needed to lubricate the agitation process. At the end, you should be left with a ball of tight, wet wool. There shouldn't be much, if any, soap left in the wool. I gently squeeze out the excess water in a dish towel, and then set somewhere to dry. It will firm up and shrink a bit during the drying process.

Once it's dry, you can sew a small loop on to make a pendant, embroidery a design on it, and you've got a lovely necklace. They also make nice buttons...

Well done!