Wet Felting Tips

Video Transcript

"Before we get started I'd like to explain a little bit about wet felting, and how it works, and help you understand the difference between wet felting and some of the other kind of felting, that you may have heard of. Some of the popular types of felting that you can find now on the internet are needle felting, which is where you actually take a very sharp needle, a specialize tool that comes from industrial felt production and your just tangling the fibers mechanically, and that will actually work with any kind of fiber, it doesn't have to be wool or animal fiber. The knitted felting or felted knitting that you also may have seen is little, also a little different in that your basically taking a knitted fabric and fulling it shrinking it down and making it denser, it's similar to felting but your, it's still not quite the same thing. What were going to be doing is were going to be taking unspun wool fibers, just the fluff and by laying it out and arranging, arranging it in layers, and adding hot soapy water. The fibers themselves will just stick to each other. This only works with wool and other types of animal fibers, and it will form a sheet of fabric just from the hot soapy water, the agitation, and the wool fibers that are arranged that way, so if your talking about felt, this is the type of felt that they've been making for thousands of years, and this is the traditional wet felting technique."