How to Felt Wool Hats

Felting is the process of transforming fibers into cloth with heat, moisture and agitation. Technically, the process is called fulling when applied to woven fabric; the term felting is more common. People felt wool to recycle wool as material for crafts or to change the look and feel of sweaters, socks and scarves. It is easy to felt wool using a washing machine technique. Start with small items like wool hats before larger items like sweaters. Either way, the same steps apply. Felt wool hats made of 100 percent wool. If the hats are a blend, such as alpaca, angora, cashmere or mohair, make sure wool content is at least 80 percent.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Wool hats
• Pillowcase
• fabric wash

1. 
   Felted Wool Hat

   Put the wool hat in a pillowcase and close the bag with a rubber band. The pillowcase protects the hat, enables more friction and keeps fibers from falling out and clogging the machine.

2. Place the pillowcase inside a top-loading washing machine. A top-loading machine provides more agitation as opposed to a front-loading machine.

3. Press the button or turn the dial to the shortest cycle on the washing machine. The knits and delicates cycle works well.

4. Adjust the water temperature to a warm setting.

5. Pour ¼ cup of fabric wash or other liquid soap designed to clean fine fibers.

6. Turn the spin cycle knob to the shortest and gentlest spin cycle. All washers are a little different. Some washers only have normal-fast, normal-slow and gentle-slow options. In this case, the normal-fast option will have to do because spinning is necessary to remove the water. Too much spinning can distort the shape of the wool hat.

7. Press the start button on the washing machine.

8. Check the felting progress after each cycle. Open the pillowcase and look at the stitches, usually up at the top of the hat. If you can still see the stitches, repeat steps 2 to 7 until the stitches are no longer visible. If the wool hat does not have stitching, you will need to make a cut in an inconspicuous spot on the wool hat-most likely the inside of the hat. If the fiber does not fray, it is sufficiently felted.

9. Dry the felted wool hat in the dryer. Place the hat back in the pillowcase and secure with rubber band. Select the low or no-heat setting until the piece is dry.

Tips & Warnings

• Substitute a mesh laundry bag for a pillowcase.
• When you felt wool hats, you do not have to use a dryer. If preferred, you can let the hat air dry.
• Do not felt more than one wool hat at a time. Avoid the risk of cross-fiber contact.

Resources

• More on Felt Wool at Craft Stylish
• How to Felt Wool at Wool Crafting

[Mindee94]

on 6/25/2009 I was able to see a demonstration of how to complete this process however it was still 'greek' to me. Thanks for the step by step breakdown with pics. Very helpful! Mindee