Wet felting ... with a helping hand

My lovely nieces  arrived this morning and the first words I heard were "What are we doing today?"
Their favourite friend (my teenage daughter) was still getting her beauty sleep I knew we'd have plenty of time so we decided to have a go at creating wet felt in preparation for making Christmas cards at a later date. 


I selected a piece of 100% wool  Prefelt and we used the needle felting equipment to add some Christmas tree shapes.

 I bought the Prefelt from Art Van Go at the Creative Threads Textile show at the NEC last month.
www.artvango.co.uk  01438 814946


Then we laid out a towel, bubble wrap, bamboo mat and put the felt on top. This was covered with some netting and hand soap and water were added.

Then it was time for some elbow grease!
The felt and fleece had to be rubbed using the bubble wrap for 15 minutes.  By the end our hands we squeaky clean and smelled lovely.

When I looked for instructions to make wet felt there were all sorts of suggestions about the type of soap that should be used e.g. soap flakes, Olive oil soap etc.  To be honest ... anything will do!

15 minutes can feel like a lifetime, but with a little help from my friend the time simply flew.
So we rinsed out felt.

 First boiling water was used,  followed by cold running tap water.











We repeated this process 3 times until the suds had 
all gone.








                                                                               



Then we laid the felt out on the bamboo mat.









Rolled it up.





 

 Rolled it forwards and backwards 20 times, then opened it up and turned the felt 90 degrees on the mat and repeated the rolling process.
We did this another 3 times.
Finally we hung the felt to dry and we will use it to create something lovely at a later date.