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The 4 Stages of Felt: Preparation, Layout, Fulling, Finishing
Stage 1- Preparation
Part one is all about design: conceptualizing, determining the best engineering approach, and doing the calculations that will get you from layout size to end size. Next, I always make mini samples to test out my materials and design ideas. This step saves a lot of time, as it helps solve many of my concerns in advance. It’s critical, because you want to feel confident when doing a layout that uses 20 metres of silk and know you made good design decisions! This step also confirms which wool colours are going to work best with my silks or papers.
Part two is all about preparing my materials, which often involves dyeing, hand-painting, and steam-setting silks. I like to create my own wool colour blends using my hand-crank carding machine. Felting is tough on the body—lots of time spent bent over at awkward angles laying down wool fibres. To shorten my layout times, I make sheets of prefelt, which is a wool layout shrunk to about 5%. Any surface design elements, such as cord work, loops, balls, fin strips, beaded strips, and smaller 3D elements, are all made in advance and slightly prefelted to 5–10%. The final step in preparation is transferring my tiny mockup design to a full-size resist pattern.
The Preparation stage can take up to 14 days for the more complex projects.
Stage 2 – The Layout
The time involved in stage 2 can be anywhere from 1 to 10 days, depending on the project. Once the layers of wool, silks, plant fibres, and surface design embellishments are assembled, the piece is wetted out with soapy water, surface rubbed, and hand rolled. When silks are sitting in wet, soapy conditions, sari silk dyes can become unstable, so it’s important to plan on finishing the silk layers in a few days. Often, I’ll shrink the piece by about 10% and let it dry. At this stage, I remove resists and fix any weak spots or attach additional embellishments. For larger garments, sometimes a hood and sleeves are joined to the coat body at the 10% shrinkage stage.
Stage 3 – Fulling
Fulling is the term used for shrinking the piece to its planned end size. Fulling mostly involves rolling, tossing, surface rubbing, and scrunching. This stage requires a lot of patience and plenty of measuring to make sure everything shrinks proportionally. I typically create a chart of about 12 measurements, listing what the shrinkage amounts need to be to reach 10%, 20%, 30%, and so on. Fulling a silk garment takes longer when working with sari silks, as you need more time to get the wool fibres to work their way through the denser silk. Fulling is a physical workout—the soaking wet piece can weigh a lot. It’s basically like working with 20–30 pound weights for three or more hours! Coats are often rolled over 4,000 rotations, with frequent removal of plastics to make sure everything stays in place. I’ve learned to take my time and now only work towards a 10% fulling per day. Much more enjoyable! Once the final size is reached, the soap is rinsed out, the piece is towel-dried, and then left to dried slightly more for half a day before being shaped. Sculptural pieces are shaped continuously during fulling and several times during the drying stages. Sculpted felt, once dried, always holds its shape.
Stage 4 – Finishing
This stage can involve heat for garment pressing, last-minute shaping, stitchwork, stretching, and framing. I use a heat gun to remove longer wool hairs. Stitching is often needed, either to attach felt or to embellish it. Wall works are framed, and hanging gear is attached. The finishing is one of the most rewarding stages.
