Cleaning Felt Fabric

Video Transcript

"Hi my name is Rachel and I'm the owner of Austin Style watch dot com street fashion site. And I'm also a freelance fashion reporter. Today we are going to talk about how to clean felt. Now felt is an amazing fabric, it's great, I love it especially because you don't have to hem it, you can just cut it out, sew with it that's why it's great for crafting. Felt is awesome. But it's got one little weakness. And that's that you can't wash it very well. You can't pop it in the washer. The washer will tear it up and the dryer will shrink it down. So for as easy it is to work with, it's that hard to clean and take care of. So I would always hand wash my felt. There's a certain school of thought that you can pop it in the gentle cycle and that may work. It might be fine but for my money, I'd hand wash my felt. It's sort of like the particle board of the fabric world. It's lots of little fibers just kind of loosely held together. While it feels sturdy it can just kind of come apart. So it needs gentle treatment to not weaken and fall to bits. So what we are going to do is hand wash it. Just take a basin, we are going to use some warm water. We are going to use a gentle detergent, something like Wool lite is good. But pretty much any detergent will really work. Just take our tiny bit of detergent and you can do this in the sink if you want. Or a bathtub. Pour a little lukewarm water, you don't want to use anything super duper hot on this cause heats sort of the enemy of felt. Then just take your felt, dip it in there and just hand wash it. And if you have stains just take your time, hand wash the felt. You are going to want to squeeze it dry but not wring it dry. So no twisting, it's very easy to damage or manipulate this kind of fabric. So just gently squeeze it. And we compress it a little bit and when you've gotten out as much water as you can, we are just going to air dry the felt. Felt is not ever something that you want to put in the dryer. So just put it out to dry let it dry by air that will help it keep it's shape. Don't pull it wring it move it any, lay it flat to dry. That's how you clean felt."