Midwest Creative Collective

Felting 101

What a great time I had yesterday! My friend Rebekah and I went to TLD Designs in Westmont and took a felting class with Tammy. Tammy makes some absolutely beautiful felted items as well as doing weaving, spinning, and other fiber arts. Her work has been highlighted in Belle Armoire magazine and she’s been on “That’s Clever” on HGTV.

I’ll just give a brief description of what we did. If you want all the details, you have to take the class. LOL I will tell you though, that you need to wear a T-shirt, not a sweater. It’s not a passive process at all. If I felted all the time, I’d definitely be in better shape!

We started the process by taking what’s basically a hunk of unspun wool, called roving. We pulled very fine fibers from it and laid them down on a sheet of muslin to form the base of our scarves.

It’s not easy to get the right amount as it needs to be very fine. Mine is almost too much!

Once we laid our fibers down then we started doing the structure of the piece. We started by laying down long strands of yarns. We wanted to use yarns that would felt well so if we added something in that wasn’t a ‘felter’, then we had to be sure that it was crossed by a piece that was. This is Rebekah starting to lay down the long strands.

Once that process was finished, we started doing our designs. We could use spirals, swirls, anything that we wanted to give structure to the design. The more structure, the sturdier the piece. When we were through with that part, we went back to fill any little areas that needed it with roving.

I was too busy working to take pictures of the rest of the process but basically we finished this part, covered it with what looked like a curtain and then got it wet. Once that was done, we started the felting process with a sander. Yep. We got to play with power tools too! The next parts of the process were the felting itself. We rolled the whole thing up, soaked it in hot water and went to work. The hardest part is the last 30 minutes, trust me on this one. My hands still hurt. After the felting is accomplished, I brought my masterpiece home and hung it to dry. And, voila, here it is…