by Carrie Schutrick

Created on: January 29, 2010

Felt is a great thing.  It's warm, sturdy, and even somewhat waterproof.  And if you have access to old wool sweaters, you can have as much felt as you want for the price of a trip through the washing machine.

The first thing to do is to check your sweater for holes.  They'll get harder to see in the felting process, so mark them with a smooth, contrasting, colorfast thread-crochet cotton is a great choice, being easy to find as well as unfeltable.  You can completely encircle the hole, or just sew a loop through the fabric next to it, or whatever works for you.

Once that's done, you have two options: you can do your felting in a washing machine, or by hand.  Both will work, though doing it by hand is much more tiring and not quite as fast.  If you've got a front-loading washing machine, you might want to work by hand; you can't open a front-loader mid-cycle to check your progress, so the risk of overfelting is greater.  But if you just want felt, and don't care about its exact thickness, a front-loader will work just fine.

In either case, there are three components to the felting process: water, agitation, and temperature changes.  So when you're setting out to felt by machine, you should do all the things the care labels on the sweaters tell you not to do.  Use a heavy-duty cycle, and heat settings that go from hot water to cold or vice-versa.  If you're only felting a few items, add something like a towel or a pair of jeans to increase the amount of bumping around your articles will do.  When felting by hand, use the hottest water you can stand.  Fill a bathtub or large bucket with enough water that your items can float a bit, and start agitating-stomping on them works well, if your container is big enough.

Keep in mind that your item will shrink in the course of felting.  How much depends on how felted it is; if you just want it to be a little sturdier, it won't have to shrink much, but if you want it to be so totally felted that you can't make out the stitches any more you may lose up to 25% of height and width. 

Once a sweater is felted, you can turn it into flat fabric for sewing.  Cutting along the seams will keep the most fabric; the seams themselves can disappear in the felting or get bulkier, depending on the original construction of the item.  For most sweaters, the important seams to get are the underarm, side and sleeve seams.  Ribbing or other fancy edge treatments can be cut off as well to use as trim.  If your sweater was knit in the round, just pick one side seam to open up, which will leave you with a larger piece of fabric once you have the sleeves off.  And if two layers of fabric stick together a bit, fear not; you can cut the connections with no worries about anything falling apart.

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