The Dodo Blog

When it comes to buying the wool for your felting project, you can feel really overwhelmed by the enormous choice available on the market. Also, depending on where you’re buying it from, you might get a lot of different options in terms of the sheep race.

So, here’s my suggestion on how to navigate your next wool shopping 🙂 in 3 easy steps.

Step 1: Is your project needle felted or wet felted?

If you’re planning to needle felt something, your best choice is wool batting. This is wool that has only been washed and carded, so the wool fibers are going in different directions, unlike wool tops, that have been combed, and therefore have all their fibers going in the same direction.

When you’re working with a needle, this type of wool is faster to felt and you get a smooth surface, instead of a surface full of visible wool fibers (where you can almost see “threads”), which is the result of needle felting with wool tops.

Also, a harder wool is easier to needle felt than a very soft one. ...

If you google words like ‘felt’ or ‘felting’, you find lots of information, ranging from industrial felt to needle felt and everything in between. So, if you’re new to felting how do you find your way through all of this? Let me help.

HANDCRAFTED WET FELT

I guess you could say that wet felt is the ‘real deal’. Though it’s apparently difficult to prove, what we now call wet felt could be the oldest textile known to mankind for the simple reason that it requires absolutely no tool to craft. All you ultimately need is your bare hands. Here’s the definition of felt by the www.newworldencyclopedia.org:

  ‘Felt is a non-woven cloth that is produced by matting, condensing, and pressing fibers together. It is the oldest form of fabric known to humankind, predating weaving and knitting. It can be of any color and made into any shape or size.’

In so many cultures around the world, felt played a central role. That was the case for some nomadic societies, where wool was an easily available res...

Wet felting for over 10 years and teaching wet felting workshops has made me very aware of the most common mistakes, that prevent you from getting the best results. So, I wanted to list them here, to help you avoid a lot of frustration, as well as wasting precious material and countless hours of work.

1. Choose the right wool for your project

So, what’s the right wool to felt? The short answer to that question is that it depends on your project. This might sound vague, but you could write whole books just on wool. The good news is – depending on where you buy your supplies – you can normally get some information on what’s the right wool for wet felting, needle felting or for getting a more compact felt, for example.

An extremely important factor to consider is the wool’s thickness or width of the fiber. This depends on the sheep breads, the climate they live in (the warmer the climate, the thinner the wool) and it’s measured in microns. The lower the micron, the finer the fiber and...

“How do I know if my felt is ready?” This is such a frequent question. And it’s answered in four words: do the pinch test!

And what’s the pinch test? When you feel your felt is solid enough not to fall apart anymore, you literally pinch the felt between your fingers to check if the fibers are still loose. If they’re not, it’s ready for fulling.