Wool Felt??? Felted Woven Wool???

hello this is Mary middle step let's design and be merry and I'm here today to talk to you a little bit about the difference between well felt and felted woven wool this has always been a question I see crop up on the sites especially started with people who are new new to stitching with wool or who have not sewn with wool before at all and they're very confused lots of different information out here so hopefully this short video will give you some explanation and I start and you can certainly go from there a lot of people have prejudice towards one or the other basically my philosophy is learn all about what the material does and then you can use it in any way you can okay as far as wool felt wool felt is different we're not talking the hundred percent acrylic wool that used to buy at the Ben Franklin that was my idea initially you can work with it but it has none of the qualities that will has to offer and so I do not recommend that in order to have a good experience I have worked with it once I have a friend who is totally allergic to wool I wanted to make or something and I used it wool felt has some wonderful colors they are different than woven walls what wool felt is is basically it is fibers not unlike this of wool roving straight from a sheep that have been heated and pressed and compressed into a sheet and you can get I work a lot with national nonwovens you can get well felts that have rayon in them and these are all blends you can get a hundred percent wool felt some people make their own wool felt by literally what flashing they literally agitate and put it with hot water and so couldn't by rubbing it and working it you can actually get a nice thick warm layer of wool and this would have been commonly how many people did it hundreds of years ago in order to have warm fibers to line their boots and shoes and moccasins in the wintertime whatever for native peoples if they had that opportunity in this case there are machine done and like I said you can get theirs beautiful wolves out there that 100% wall and otherwise you can get them in blends they all work one thing about the blends I have found even though the instructions will say do not wash I find that I wash them on a gentle cycle in hot water and they generally will come out just fine and then I kind of repress them and they have an entirely different hand to them and I just want to show you one of the neat thing is that when you wash them if you can see this here you'll get this nubby type texture and it does shrink and then I press it and you can get it back to the nice smooth texture but some people really like doing this and they get it for beards and animals and rough textures that they enjoy very much also something that well felt has to offer is that you can usually get a pure white everybody knows or most everybody who knows anything about wool realizes that you really can't get a perfect white wool that's a hundred percent wool bleach doesn't work on wall it tends to disintegrate it and so there are some rules that come very close but if you really want a true true white you would probably go with the wool felt and you can mix it the one thing you have to remember about will felt is if you're only going to wash the item once in a great while maybe it's a wall hanging and or something you keep on a side table and something finally dribbles on it and you would soak it that's going to work out fine if this is something you're going to wash repeatedly then over time it probably will not hold up because there is no woven structure to this wool felt there's absolutely no oven structure it's just simply pieces of fuzz that have been held together through heat and abrasion and agitation and and then pressed and and and the like I said the colors you can get are very different than many of the wools they just have a different effect and however they are making some of the wool felts with some of the more natural looking type things the other thing that you can do with both wool and wool felt is you can use some of this and you can kind of play with your own by taking a small amount of well felt and you can get these little needles these of these tools they're filthy needles and by punching and if I lift this up this is you have to work on something that you can punch these needles into they're sharp you'll see that on the back if you can see you can see it it's what looks like hair growing grass growing through it but basically it adheres that wool and it's not easy to pull out and you can shape this and you can get little details so that may be something that you can use I did a lot of it with when I was selling wool yarn knitting and felting it and then I would accent things and you can get circles you can get shapes all kinds of fun things so that might be something you want to try you can get this little thing at a big box store anyways so that's your wool felt or I call it well felt it's probably will blend but there are wool felts you have to seek around and just find out from the people that you're buying it from you know whether it's been a washed if they're making it if they're an ending their own 100% wool felt you'll pay more for the sheet but you'll be able to you can ask them right away and they've obviously had it in hot water you probably won't have to rewash one of the things I forgot to mention one thing that's nice about will felt especially for beginners is that you never have any fraying on the edge you get nice clean edges so it's great generally speaking wool felt is also or wool felt blends are less expensive and you can buy yardage they're not as commonly found you may have to go online there are some quilt shops that can't handle it but you can get any heritage so it's great it makes a great backing on many of your wall projects that's less expensive and yet it's nice and soft I find I use it for mug rugs and you can mix it in with wool felt again know and understand what it does that this is not a product that is made for continual washing it will eventually degrade because it's just loosely woven fibers okay when we talk about wool woven wool there's so many different kinds of woven wool but basically what you're talking about and I'm gonna get a needle here is you're talking about a wool fabric that has a selvage I just got this piece from Pendleton they have a sale in March and I always indulge my love of Pendleton wool and this happened to be a piece that they had salvaged is regular woven this is a fabric that if you look at it and this piece may show it better if I can get close you can see that there are threads running both ways it's been woven on a machine and you can see let's see if I can pull some out this has been this has happens to be a hand die that I got from a local quilt shop and you could see that I can pull actual strings out of it and you'll notice that there are threads that are going both ways and you can actually see that in this one it's a thinner piece of wool and if you look on the back you can also see that it's woven you can see the structure of threads this will not come apart if it's been had died chances are it's been in water and it's been washed and dried and shrunk you can usually use that directly right away if you're buying wool on a bolt it's highly likely it has not been washed and would likely need to be washed so you have to take into consideration that there may be some shrinkage because by washing it in hot water and agitating it it causes the fibers to tighten up and to mat and become heavy this is some Melton wool this is a very thick wall it makes a great backing and this stuff I have bought it at at a Pendleton and a lot of reenacting places will use this because it's an excellent wool for like outdoor well and I really had to work to get this piece to come out but you can see again that it's a woven fabric and you can cut circles and once it's been washed which I usually wash I tend to wash them on a mild lighter wash because I happen to know that Pendleton wills are almost like matted to begin with they're so tightly woven that it's almost not an issue but I do we wash them again for further making the edges and this is an example of a circle I cut out and you can see that there are absolutely no edges that are going to come loose on here so obviously it's nice to get good well if you get inexpensive world you need to develop a critical eye some walls are very loosely woven and they will be much more difficult to deal with I've had some loosely woven wool and that I got from a local store and it was not a quilt shop and it never I could never get it to felt up enough and it continued to fray um did not care for it here's some this is a shooting wall again very thin wall that I got from Pendleton and if you look very closely hopefully you can see I can get this up close you can see that there's some fraying here because I purposely pulled out some threads and you can see it's hard to pull them out so for those of you that like that but hopefully this and this again is this as a shooting weight which is totally this is like a third of the weight of this blue Melton both have been felted I put all my wool into I buy these on the bolt and I put them into my washing machine and like I said I tend to for the Pendleton Wolves at least tend to use a gentle cycle but I you want something that will agitate in your washing machine and some people do this by hand they're able to do it by hand with smaller pieces and that education in the hot water and then stopping that action and letting it dry you'll get a nice matted piece and you won't have to worry about it hopefully bleeding either this is a piece of coat weight pendleton wool and this piece is really interesting I got this and I have never had to wash it it's got such a tight edge it just doesn't fray out and go figure but it's been nice to have it's a hundred percent well and like I said this is the piece I just got I put it in the washing machine yesterday you can see how some of the edges along the cut edge and again a it has a selvage edge so if you're buying on the boat you'll find the selvage edge usually you won't find that so much you may find it now and then on like a fat quarter of wool that's been hand dyed and again hand dyed wool will have usually been in a dye bath so it's been in hot water and has had some agitation so it's usually ready to use hopefully this information has been helpful to you and hopefully it'll clarify what you are buying never hesitate to ask questions I see people who occasionally will buy something and they'll say oh I got it in it frayed out or I you know I didn't have enough yardage once I shrunk it so you need to know those things when you're buying your wool obviously small pieces some people reclaim wool from used clothing and that's fine just be sure it has usually twenty percent no more than 20 percent acrylic you're certainly welcome to try anything beyond that and you can use that for you know if it has less than 20 percent acrylic in it usually that will also work and felt quite fine some people call the term fooling by the way so don't let the terminology scare you last but not least last but not least add applause there remember that natural wolves will have different colors you're not gonna get your real vivid colors and again there are no pure whites this is one of the lighter ones that I have remember that white can be achieved by contrast by placing a light color next to a darker color you can get it to appear lighter and wolves in general will be more expensive there's no doubt about it that it is a a more expensive proposition and the other thing you need to know about wools is it is very important not to use worsted wool worsted wool czar made with thread that are not meant to felt they will not felt and you'll always have fraying they were meant for clothing usage and I have I got some once by mistake sent to me I didn't see it they told me it was a different type of wool and when I got it I realized it was worsted and I have used that for backings on my wool by carefully using fusible around the edges I have been able to use some of it for that it's beautiful wool but it's not intended for this purpose and you really can't make it felt so worsted wool if you find the most beautiful piece and you're trying to recycle that would be something you wouldn't want to probably invest in unless you want to use it as backing with the fusible otherwise like I said hopefully this claret has clarified some of the differences and will help those of you who are looking for wool and want to spend your pennies wisely and know what you're buying hope this information has been helpful to you if you've enjoyed it please view some of my other videos you can subscribe to my channel you can also visit my website www.marykay.co.uk/awilliam visit

Channel: DesignAndBeMary

Views: 2,568

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: wool, wool applique, wool felt, felt, woven wools, felted wool, washed wool, felt roving, roving, colors of wool

Id: L7GKeL__aP8

Length: 15min 10sec (910 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 31 2020