Felting

How and why, what and where

I fell in love with felt in Helsinki.

It was the year of the Tour du Mont Blanc, United Nude, and the North Sea Jazz Festival and Michael and I were flying home from Helsinki. We were already in fairytale mode.

We’d reached Helsinki via an epic train trip from Rotterdam through magical Scandinavia, and performing street side cats and wild smoked salmon had us in the perfect mood to appreciate the seemingly Bjork-inspired, felt hats (yes, I know she’s Icelandic) and funky, Finnish versions of the ugg boot.

We couldn’t help but wonder if it was all just for tourists or whether people really got around like that in winter…If so, whole streets would be filled with snow and grumpy people in weird elf-hats.

(Maybe the hats are designed to cheer themselves up. I know people giggle when I walk down the street in mine. Friends walk on the other side of the street.)

Traditional

I did a little research when we arrived home and discovered that felting is a long-standing Finnish tradition. There they make it from the wool of the Finnsheep, large lambs that produce a fleece particularly suited to felting and apparently “part of the national memory, identity and culture of Finland” (according to MTT Agrifood Research Finland).

I became quite taken with the idea of learning how to felt and searched and searched for a winter workshop in Helsinki.

I discovered one in Summer Hill.

I’ve also now discovered that felting may have begun in Asia – it was certainly used for Mongolian yurts and Turkish tents – and was one of the earliest processed textiles in the world…

Dog jumpers. That’s it.

In my first felt workshop, the teacher was a little bemused that all I wanted to work on were dog jumpers. I’d had a mad idea that I could make these beautiful, pure wool, hand felted dog jumpers, sell them and give the proceeds to Monika’s Doggie Rescue.

Having said that, I did have the urge to make a scarf at Easter. My mum was going to Norway, it was her birthday and how long was it since she received a hand-made present from her eldest daughter???

As luck would have it, she didn’t get one scarf, but two and I spent the ENTIRE weekend making them, as the first one turned out slightly differently than intended and the second one kinda went awry…

Mum became so nostalgic, she sent me a card asking me did I remember when I used to make all sorts of crafty stuff when I was a kid. I’d really rather NOT remember some of those episodes.

In any case, I’ve now done several test runs of the Pooch Poncho – the Dogosaurus and Camo-dog for example – with the Pygmy-Pony and Just Plain Cute designs yet to come. Lots of refining is being done on my felting skills and also the test pattern for the jumpers themselves.

How’s it done?

In case you’re still trying to get your mind around the idea of hand making felt, here’s a brief explanation.

For wool felt use washed and combed wool laid in layers, with the fibres of each layer running at a 90 degree angle to the layer below.

Then pour hot soapy water over the wool, and gently agitate it. When the wool gets wet, the small scales of the individual hairs open up, and the agitation causes the scales to interlock with each other, forming a solid mat of material. The heat, pressure, moisture, and friction create a solid piece of fabric from the individual fibres.

After that the job’s not done though – you’ve got to roll it a lot, then throw it and after a while it’s done!