An Adventure in Felting

At the Fibershed Symposium in November I was entranced by Some felt at Robin Lynde’s booth: the surface was unmixed, unsorted pieces of a Jacob fleece. I was having visions of making myself a jacket from this beautiful fabric.

When you process wool there can be a lot of waste. I don’t like to throw away my drumcarding or combing waste, but up till now have just been hanging on to it. Well, a wet felting session over at FARM 2.6 gave me the perfect opportunity to try out the technique on a small scale.

We made a resist for slippers using boots as a template (felting shrinks the wool considerably, so rubber boots are a good model). I made these slippers for Numenius using Suffolk as the first two layers and ending up with Jacob on the surface.

Felting is a lot of work and requires some upper-body strength! I decided to add to the punishment by kneading some sour dough afterwards last night…