Felting Rugs

In preparation for our felting workshop in a few weeks Matthew and I finished setting up the new felting space outside the mill and tried it out!

We decided to make a couple rugs from some beautiful Romney cloud from the Paddock's at Manchester. Matthew sheared this wool last year and we finally got to process it! Some of this wool we processed into cloud for the felting workshop and some of it we processed into roving for spinning.

Our felting platform works quite nicely. It's a simple set up of a pallet covered in a tarp but it's close to the outdoor hot water spigot! Makes felting a dream.

Here are some pictures of the process we'll be following at our March 3rd Workshop.

First we laid out our design.

Then we started to fill in the spaces between. It's important to make sure that all the spaces are filled in evenly and completely.

We decided to use all three colors we had available to try to play on the depth of color you can get from un-dyed sheep's wool.

After you fill in the design, time for another layer to hold it all in place.

Then we added lots of soap and hot water and wrapped it in an old curtain around a pipe and agitated it until it was felted.

This is the finished rug after a few rinses and a trip through the dryer.

Looking forward to trying this with a group of people on March 3rd!