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Felting - what the devil is it and how do you do it? We’ve all probably had the experience at one time or another. Mine, was when I’d first gone away to college. Washing machines were strange and exotic creatures to me in those days. Whilst I had always been expected to help out with work around the house – washing clothes had been the sole preserve of my Mum. But at University she wasn’t there obviously, so it was just me and the washing machine! I remember wanting to cry (ok I DID cry - hey it was college, angora sweaters took an age to save for!) when I pulled out my gorgeous new baby blue angora cardigan to find that it was half the size and a totally different texture. It was many years before I forgave that washing machine! The magic of felting through washing wool garments at a higher temperature took my many more years to discover (and appreciate when I’d actually INTENDED to do it How to felt wool Felting is the process of producing a tightly bonded fabric from a knitted piece of work. It produces a thick, dense texture with a slightly fuzzy quality. This is produced when the scales on the wool swell and bind together through heat, water and rubbing them together (which can sometimes happen unintentionally if washing in a hot washing machine.) So, how do you felt successfully? It’s important to choose the right yarn – natural wool is perfect but you have to make sure it hasn’t been treated or mixed with a synthetic fiber. Anything labeled ‘superwash’ has been coated with a special treatment to make it safe to machine wash – we don’t want that in this case. It’s hard to gauge exactly how much a piece of knitting will shrink when felting. So the best advice is to knit a swatch or sample square (a tension square is perfect) and see how much it shrinks by. This way you’ll be able to work out how big you’ll have to knit the original item in order to get your desired felted size.
Another great use for felting is recycling. Try felting an old sweater that you no longer wear and turning it into a stylish bag, glasses case, I-pod cover, tablemat – anything you can think of!
how to felt your knitting So, you’ve now got the gist of felting, but how do you actually do it? You could put it in the washing machine on a hot wash but make sure that you put it in with things that are really going to rub up against it – like a pair of jeans. Felting by hand has some advantages – the main one being that it gives you more control over the process, as you can manipulate the fabric yourself to get your desired effect. Use hot water and wear rubber gloves. Submerge the fabric in the hot water and rub it in on itself – as if you wear scrubbing washing on an old fashioned washboard. You may need to experiment with different pressures to get your desired effect – start off gently and then work up from there. Felting is great to do with left over pieces of yarn that you can quickly knit up into squares. What’s fantastic about it is that you never quite know what the end result will be.
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