Some of you may remember that way back in March, I generated my first wool bats off of my drum carder (see “Never felt this way before”).  At that time I was really excited about making felted hats, but I didn’t have a hat block, so I had to shelve the project.  Turns out getting a hat block in good condition for less than $50 is not so easy.  Finally I succeeded.  I picked one up on eBay for around $45.  It’s not in great condition, but it’s the right size and it will do for learning on.

Making a felt hat can start in one of two ways.  You can either make the felt directly on the hat form, or you can make felt first and then shape it on the block.  I decided to try the latter.  There are a number of YouTube videos that explain how to make felt hats.

I started by protecting my work surface.  As it turned out, this did not work very well.  I will need to get a vinyl tablecloth before trying it again.  Next I poured a line of dawn dish detergent all over the table.  (Dawn detergent, original blue, is perfectly suited to washing wool:  so say all the wool care guides.  It is up there with the far more expensive Synthrapol for performance, and far better than Woolite, which everyone agrees is not at all the thing for washing wool in.  Go figure.)

Next I laid out two bats of wool, touching, and not quite overlapping. With the fibers of both running towards me on the table.  In a kettle on the stove I boiled water.  After pouring this into my daughter’s watering can, I poured an even coat of water over the entire surface of the wool.  Thus the water was very hot, but not quite boiling. (I quickly realized that I was going to need something to soak up excess water so I laid down an old sheet under the fibers.)

Using a gloved hand, I gently rubbed the wool in a circular motion.  You get a feel for this portion pretty quickly.  If you press down too hard then you move the wool around too much.  You have to apply just enough pressure to to begin felting the fibers without pushing all the wool into a great big lump.

When this seemed to be coming together fairly well, I laid down another layer of wool, this time with the fibers running in the opposite direction.  I repeated putting down detergent and water and rubbed it down again.  I did this twice more for a total of 4 layers, each of them running opposite to the one before.  In retrospect, I would have used fewer layers, but I’ll get to that in a future post.  Anyway, by this time I was dripping all over the floor, and since the felt was now holding together as a single piece, I moved the whole operation to the floor of my shower, and continued to work the wool until it had tightened up into a smooth surface.  Even so, I discovered that I had areas where I had not worked to initial layering in well enough and nothing I could do, neither needle nor wet felting, would seal these splits.

Next week, I will show you how I attempted to make a hat out of this mass of felt.