Felting work in progress

In December I was finishing-up a Soap Box Car baby blanket. It took a while because I used a combination of wet and dry felting. I enjoyed it and learned a lot (again)! My husband really liked it and wanted to keep it for our wee one, but I think our friend who commissioned it may have objected! Haha!

Wet felting is when olive oil soap, hot water and friction causes wool fibres to fuse/tangle together. Most of my projects are made using the wet felting process.

Below are photos of how the wool looks as I create the image. Essentially, it's like an oil painting, where the layers are done in sequence. With the final layer on top.

After I felted the base of the blanket (the blanket and the larger details), I had the fine detailed work to do.

Dry felting is when one or several straight needles are used to fuse/tangle dry wool onto dry wool. The needle has spurs like a fish hook, basically tangling the wool fibres to each other as the needle is pulled out.

There are a lot of finishing details on this blanket, so dry felting was the only way to go in combination with the less precise wet felting process I used as the base.

The final product:

Note: I cleaned out the Frankfurt craft shops of their navy blue wool. Twice!!