To help you scale down to the best wool for felting, we did this round-up of the top-recommended products for the job:. It is really soft, fluffy, and of good quality. The 50 bundles come in an assortment of rich colors in individual resealable pouches; your leftover or unused wool can stay nice and clean. Still, it is beautiful for top wool, superb in quality, color selection, and ease of use, particularly for needle felting. It makes good practice wool for beginners, but even experienced felters can use it for miniature dolls, figurines, and animals.
Or embellish large projects by adding highlights and colorful fine details. This carded wool batting is harvested ethically and processed with the specific standards for felting. It is soft and easy to pull separate.
A bundle of the wool weighs 1 ounce and dyed with non-toxic Oeko-tex certified coloring. That means you get to select just your favorite colors from the vast, not to mention absolutely gorgeous, selection. It makes an excellent foundation for quickly wet felting structures such as bags, wall hangings, rugs, etc.
Deciding which felting wool to felt with can be confusing. Whether needle felting or wet felting there are such a large choice and types of felting wool including many dyed and natural wools.
This guide explains the main categories of processed wool and common uses at each stage. Fleece is the unprocessed wool shorn off a sheep, usually some parts of poor quality highly matted wool are removed. It will be unwashed, greasy, a bit smelly and tangled. This wool would need processing before use. Some breeds of sheep and goats have beautiful curly locks which can be used for adding interest and texture to pieces, or using as hair for animals or fairies and so on. The locks are very gently washed to keep the curls intact.
This often leaves in some of the wool grease, called lanolin and sometimes vegetable matter too, so it may require some further processing by hand before use. The locks can be sold as a section of fleece, or separated into individual locks.
The next level of processing is carding. The majority of vegetable fibers such as grass, straw, small twigs etc will have been picked out. This removes further vegetable matter, teases and untangles, loosens curls or crimps and removes very short fibres.
It will also straiten the fibres somewhat. Fibres can be carded with hand brushes or on a drum carder of varying size. The staple length is the length of the wool strand lengthways.
The wool strands can then be sorted in to their differing lengths. At this stage the wool is ready for dyeing if desired. The strands are also measured to sort the wools thickness.
The carding will separate fibres, making the wool lofty and soft and easy to handle. As someone who has taught spinning and fiber classes since I have always explained felting this way:.
Wool fibers have tiny microscopic scales along their surface. Some types of wool have larger scales than others. The types of wools that are coarser and smoother and have the highest sheen to them such as Lincoln, Leicester, Wensleydale have larger scales and reflect more light off their surface leading to the sheen.
Finer wools of which Merino is the main example have much, much smaller scales and do not reflect light and have a more "matt" look to the surface of the yarn or finished knitting. When wool fibers are shocked by temperature and rubbing the little scales lift up and as the fibers rub against each other they lock down on nearby fibers and form a tighter and tighter mass and form felt.
Felt can be made from "just the fibers" unspun, or as many knitters are discovering, from knit pieces that are felted after knitting. Many unhappy owners of fine wool sweaters have discovered felting by accident when a usually well-meaning mate or child dumps a wool sweater into the washing machine and out comes a much smaller, thicker sweater.
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