Felting Failure

I've been quite fascinated by the world of felting wool recently, there are some fantastic blogs out there dedicated to this - Betz White and LucyKate Crafts are some of my favourites at the moment. The items I have seen online and in books have really inspired me to have a go at this seamingly simple craft and art-form.

For those of you who aren't familiar with this craft (and I really wasn't only a month ago) Felting is the result of washing knitted wool in the washing machine on a hot temperature and making it shrink or felt....lets be honest we have all done this accidentally at some point....I'm just wishing now I'd kept the results rather than throwing these away.

So I toddled off to the high street this afternoon in search of a wool sweater in a charity shop. I didn't realise just how little wool there is out there, I know that wool sweaters are always more expensive than man-made fibres but thought there would still be a lot of pure wool out there, maybe people simply don't give wool sweaters to charity shops in winter (that would make sense as it is pretty chilly outside right now).

It took searching through 3 charity shops until I located a 100% lambswool sweater that didn't come with the re-assurance that it wouldn't shrink in the wash ... not exactly what I was searching for in this project.

So I came home with my festive red lambswool sweater and felt really quite naughty putting it in the washing machine at 95degrees in the hope that it comes out teddy-bear size.

Well I either the sweater company did something to make the jumper indestructable or I did something wrong as my should-be-felted sweater is in the same dimensions as it entered the machine a hour earlier. I'm sooooooooo disappointed....

I guess the positives to this little project are that I have donated some money to charity and will donating a festive red lambswool very clean sweater in the next day or so.

Will try again after Christmas