Felt-Covered Soap: Wet Felting

Video Transcript

"Before we get started making our felted soaps, I'd like to talk a little bit about how wet felting works. There's a lot of things around now that are calling themselves felting. Needle felting is one thing where you use a little pointed tool to manually tangle up dry fibers. You can actually do that with any kind of fiber. That comes from an industrial process so that's very different than what we are doing today. There's also knitted felting, or felted knitting, which involves yarn and knitting before you get to that process. But we are doing traditional wet felting with wool, or you can use other animal fibers as well. It's the same technique that's been used for thousands of years, and it only works with animal fibers. We're just going to lay out the fibers in a random way. We're going to add hot water. We're going to add soap, which obviously we have the soap already built into our process. And we are going to agitate the fibers and add pressure, and that's really just going to take our fluff and form it directly into a fabric. So we don't have to go through a yarn step and we are not manually tangling the process in a industrial way. We are just going to use the hot water, soap, and our hands to create our felt fabric around our soap."