Wet felt a hat - PEP BB textile.straw.felt.hat

I just realized I'd made this hat two years ago...and never posted pictures!

The hat is made of a local llama's wool (that I washed and carded) and sheep wool roving. Llama wool does not felt nearly as well as sheep wool roving! If I were to make a hat again, I'd probably make it just out of sheep roving, but the llama wool was free, and it's really neat to have a llama wool hat!

Here's some pictures of the process:

Step 1 lay the roving out in criss crossing layers in the shape of half a hat

Then, put at least three layers of wool on the other side, criss-crossing the direction of the layers. Make sure there's over lap around your hat shape template (I made my template out of one of those giant Amazon bubble mailers.)

Once both sides have wool, get it wet with soapy warm water and cover with bubble wrap. Scrub, scrub, scrub the bubble wrap

Looking back at pictures, it looks like I added more wool around the brim, to give it, you know, a pirate brim. Just keep felting. I believe at this step, I was rolling the hat in it's template in the bubble wrap.

More wool was added for the brim. Felting hats is depressing, because it takes a really long time for it to take shape, and it likes to fall apart!

Eventually, you have to take the hat off of it's template and start trying to form it into a 3D object. Upon doing this, mine decided to start getting thin in places, spreading out, losing shape, looking terrible. It was a nightmare. I believe at this point I dug up all the brown sheep wool roving I had and used it to hold the hat together. I believe I also did some furious needle felting. And folded the stretched out parts and sewed them with spun llama wool to hold the stupid thing together in a reasonable-ish shape.

The terrifying moment of it really not looking like a hat, so you stitch the fraying thing together with wool you spun. Now it looks like a dead animal Frankenstein stitched together. Yay!

Just keep felting, just keep felting. And wishing, and hoping. And praying.

It's more hat-like!

More felting. So much felting. Hours have gone into this hat. Hours of kneeling over my bathtub scrubbing with my hands wrapped in bubble wrap. Wool just plain takes a long time to felt together. Watching any video on felting hats will show you that you will probably spend 6+ hours just scrubbing the thing to get it to felt.

It finally no longer looks like a creature Frankenstein stitched together, and more like a hat. Also pictured is the bubble wrapped 'hat form' I used.'

ironing/steaming the thing to get crip lines.

Not pictured is the cardboard shapes I cut to fold the brim onto to get the tricorn shape and to iron against.

Look, it's a hat! It's on my head! I did it!

You can also see my son's black pirate hat (I used 100% black wool felt, and then added more roving and lots of felting to get it in the right shape, and my daughter's hat, which was was entirely welt/needle felted from wool roving.)

I actually did even more work on my hat the following year, wet and needle felting it a ton more to tighten it up. I just don't happen to have any pictures of me in it. I'll try to take some tomorrow.

For now, you get the Family of Pirate Hats, taken in bad lighting because everyone is asleep in the house and I dare not turn on too many lights for fear of waking the children!

tightened up and finished wool tricorn, alongside the rest of the tricorns I've made!