Washing Felt Bracelets

Video Transcript

"To do our next step, we need to treat our wool very gently at first. The only thing that's holding this together is a little bit of friction, and static basically, so I'm going to add some soap. The soap acts as a lubricant, and a wetting agent. When you get all those suds in there it will help the wool be nice and wet, and the individual wool fibers will swell up. The fibers have little scales on the surface of each individual wool fiber. When the fiber swells, those scales open up, and in addition to the mechanical tangling of the fibers, those scales will lock into the scales on adjacent wool fibers, and that's what makes the felt form, and be really tight so that you can't get it apart. I'm going to add my hot water, and I have to squish it to get it to be wet enough. All I'm really doing here is just pressing with the ends of my fingers, and trying to get it wet all the way through, and doing that without totally disarranging everything I've done. At this point, you can flip it over, and squeeze and pinch, and I'm just going to have to keep pinching like this for about five or ten minutes; depending on how much wool I have in here. This process will actually start forming the felt, and you want to make sure that your linen cord doesn't work its way out of your felt donut at this point. Keep an eye on that, and keep squishing all the way around, flip it over and squish. Keep doing that for a while, and then we'll go on to our next step."