Felting can be done either by hand with water and pine soap or using a washing machine.
Hand Felting
Hand felting is easy as long as you have just the tools you need. Before you start felting, you should have foam suitable for the needle base, felting needle, and needle head, bubble wrap to be placed on the table as a substrate, bubble wrap for watering felt work; a light curtain made entirely of man-made fibers, scissors, boiled water in a water tank and a piece of water.
It is a good idea to start felting on a needle base. Pieces or fluff threads are composed on a needle pad and needled in a few stitches. When knitting, the felting needle should be kept vertical and quilted through the materials. The work can then be carefully removed from the needle tray.
Then take out the bubble wrap, as the actual felting should be done on top of the bubble wrap. The work to be felted should be placed between the light curtain fabrics, and then the felt work should be soaked in hot water by soaking it in a bubble cushion soaked in water. Rub another pine soap into the moth dipped in water.
The felt work should be rubbed well in both the longitudinal and width directions and in the direction of the patterns so that a mixture of hot water and soap creates soap foam. This process should be continued for about 10 minutes.
After that, you should turn the felting work around and do the saponification on the other side of the felting work. This felting process with pine felt, and water is crucial to the success of felting.
You can test whether felting is successful by stretching the surface of the felted material. If fibers come off, it is not yet felt enough. Good fibers do not release any fibers at all.
When the felting is complete, you can rinse off the work with soapy water. Clean felt work could be allowed to dry on a flat surface at room temperature. Once the work is dry, it can be finished and pressed with iron using wool heat on the iron. After this, the edges of the work can be cut neat, sew the seams and make finishes.
If you find that the felting sheet is too thin for your job, no worries, you can felt several additional layers on top of each other. If a hole gets into the work during felting, it can be easily repaired by needling a hole of the same color to close the hole.
Felting Using a Washing Machine
For example, if you felt your slippers in a washing machine, you should first put plastic inside the slippers and then sew the plastic onto the slipper. Use cotton thread for sewing with a few long stitches. The plastic is there to keep the slippers from becoming clogged.
After this, the slippers or any felted crafts can be put in the washing machine using a rainbow wash program and a temperature of 40 degrees. When felting in the washing machine, it is not necessary to use pine soap, but ordinary laundry detergent is sufficient. In addition to the work to be felted, you should put a little more laundry in the washing machine, for example, towels.
However, the machine must not be too full. When the felting work has been completed, remove it from the machine and the plastics from the slippers. After this, the felt work must be shaped as soon as it is removed from the machine.
If you have felted slippers, you can shape them by putting the slippers on your feet for a while. The felting should also finally be brushed wet with a coarse brush, which completes the surface of the felt work.
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