Wet Felting with Kids

Today, another permie asked me how to wet felt with kids. This is a very serendipitous question, because I just taught wet felting to 4 groups of elementary-aged kids today (and taught 4 other groups on Monday). I'm dead on my feet right now, and rather worn out, but I'm going to try to congeal my thoughts on teaching wet felting to kids.

"Ingredients"

• Bubble wrap! You want it long enough to fold over your project, and wide enough that your project will stay inside the bubble wrap. With my students, I used 1 foot by 3 feet pieces of bubble wrap.
• Liquid soap. I like Dr Bronners. One student had a reaction to the mint Dr. Bronners, so I switched to using unscented. Felting can be done without soap, but the soap helps lubricate the wool, and the alkalinity speeds up the felting. It also helps the wool not stick to your hands.
• Spray bottles. You want at least 1 spray bottle per 4 kids. Kids are not patient waiting for other kids! 1 bottle for 4 kids is a good minimum.
• Warm water (in the spray bottles). If you don't have warm water, cold water will work. Warm water is just faster.
• Wool. You want something like Romney or Corriedale. Those have nice long fibers that are "grippy." I don't like to work with Merino, as it's so "slippery" and doesn't felt well. I can also attest to Llama wool does not wetfelt. I like to order my wool from Weir Crafts, but the Corriedale roving from the Woolery is also good. I prefer to buy colors individually, rather than in "assorted" sets, as the amount of wool in those sets is really small.

"Instructions"

• Step 1: Have the students work on one half of their bubble wrap. Kids really like to make their creation REALLY BIG. I told my students today to make it about the size of their hands. This helped ensure there was enough wool for everyone. But, you can totally go larger.
• Step 2: Lay out the wool in thin layers. I tell the kids to pull the wool apart gently to make a sort of "web" and lay it down vertically. Make a complete layer of vertical wool. Then do a layer of horizontal wool. Then a layer diagonal in one direction, and then diagonal in another direction. Have the kids check to see if there holes or thin spots and layer more wool accordingly. These layers can all be in one color (I generally used the plain cream wool that I had donated to me for this....because I had a lot of it. But, kids can also do these layers in different colors)





I didn't get any pictures today. This is my daughter 3 years ago when she was in kindergarten. Here she is layering the wool.



• Step 3: Add designs (optional): My students this week make snails, cats, dogs, flowers, sunsets, axolotls, people, stars, hearts. and just fun colors in stripes and swirls. This isn't necessary, but it's fun. Remind students that wet felting is like and experiment. The wool will wiggle around and change shapes. That's okay! It's fun to see how it turns out!
• Step 4: Add water and soap. You can do this by drizzling a few drops of soap and then spraying with water (this is what I did) or mix up water and soap. Premixing might help prevent kids from adding too much soap! /list]
  

  

  Here's my daughter spritzing with water. Her project was larger than what I had my kids make today. But, we wanted to turn it into a pouch.

  
  [list]Step 5: Once their project is wet, have the kid double check that there aren't any holes or thin areas. Add more wool as necessary. The spraying with water might also disturb the kids' designs. Have them double-check and fix their felting[
• Step 6: Fold the bubble wrap over the design and begin the felting. You can either use a rolling pin over the bubble wrap, or you can just roll the bubble wrap up and wiggle/agitate it with your hands. When my daughter was little, we started with the rolling pin and then moved to rolling it up. With my students today, I didn't have enough rolling pins, so we just started with rolling up the bubble wrap and agitating it





using a rolling pin



Rolling it up and aggitating it



• Step 7: Open it up the felt and check on it. See how it's felting and adjust if necessary. Then fold the bubble wrap back over it and roll it the other direction and felt for a while.
• Step 8: Repeat Step 7 until the wool is firmly felted. You can test this by putting your hand on the felt and pushing gently at the wool. If individual pieces move around, felt more. If they don't, move onto step 10!
• Step 9: Once the project is well felted so that the strands don't move independently, pick up the felt and roll it/scrub it in your hands to really felt it down. Do this for at least 30 seconds.
• Step 10: Rinse it cold water! Rinse and squeeze until the soap suds all come out.
• Step 11: Have the kids squeeze as much water out of it before they leave the sink! If you don't tell them this, they will dribble water EVERYWHERE!

For the life of me, I can't find the video I learned from years ago. This one shows the basic principles:


If you want to show them how felt was done in ancient times, below is a video about felting on the Eurasian Steppe. Most of my classes that I taught felting to today were my ancient history classes. So I showed them the video below and paused it multiple times, explaining that we were using bubble wrap instead of a "mother felt" and that we were going to roll it with our hands, rather than it getting rolled by horses. But, just like how the horses had to roll the felt for miles, we're going to roll/agitate ours for a long time!