Simply put, felt is a fabric. It can be both soft and hard, flat or sculptural, it can be made in a variety of ways and produce a wide range of items. It is marvellous and I just adore making it.
When I made my first ever piece of felt on day 1 of the Foundation Felt course at Artybird Carnforth, my tutor, Kate, told us that by the end of the year we wouldn't know how to make felt, and she was right! In that first year, I learnt so many ways to create it that I didn't know just 1 way but a wide range of techniques to create different types of felt, using different types of fibre and for a range of different purposes.
Felt is predominantly made using wool (although other fibres can be used depending on your technique). There are hundreds of different breeds of sheep in the World, each producing fibre with different characteristics and therefore requiring different techniques to felt.
There are 2 main ways to make felt: wet felting and needle felting.
Wet felting uses water, soap and agitation to create a felted fabric whereas needle felting uses a barbed needle to stab and mesh the fibres together. I'm not going to go into detail here about how each technique works, we'll save that for another post!
Felt is an amazing textile to create and work with and holds so many possibilities for creating pictures, sculptures and everyday items and I never tire of making it.
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