I have been hearing about felting in your dryer all over the place. I wouldn’t mind less time rolling my felt so I thought I better give it a try. I wanted to try some of the felt batts I made last week and wanted to try some designs for belt pouches. None of these have been ironed or blocked yet
I used batts for all of these. The orange(supposed to look like leather and does in person) one is merino I dyed and carded into a batt. The pink is from last weeks carding of left overs. It is mostly merino with a little corriedale in it. The brown striped pouch and flat piece of felt are from last weeks left over carding as well but has a lot of different fibers with different micron counts, some dyed and some natural.
This one came out the best. It felted the most in the dryer. It didn’t shrink much. It didn’t buckle it’s resist.
This one did the next best. The ropes attached well and it was felted but not as much as I would like.
These two were felted but not much.
For this experiment I decided to treat them all the same. I laid the wool out around the resists, covered them with netting and rubbed them all the same. I then wrapped them around a damp towel then wrapped that in another towel and tied the bundle. I let it bump around in my dryer with no heat for 20 min then unrolled it, made sure the net wasn’t stuck and rolled them up from the other end. I let it do another 20 min in the dryer. I took it back to my work table unwrapped them, cut out the resists and then rolled all of them 50 times in both directions in my reed mat with a pool noodle in the middle. This was to set the cut edge and felt them a little more.
I then fulled them as I normally would, rinsed out all the soap and blocked them a little. I would say that over all it worked. They are not felted enough for my liking and need more work. The felt was not far enough along when it came out of the dryer. I normally wouldn’t has started fulling them when I did for this experiment but the idea was to eliminate the manual rolling. I am not to happy with the pink pouch or the brown pieces. I am going to wet them again and roll them in my stick blind. Next week I will let you know how that went.
I think it definitely has potential. There are things that would make it better. I think if the dryer didn’t have the fins in it that would be better. It would roll it more and thump(drop) it less. I see that some of the modern dryers don’t have fins. I have plans for a roller that uses a big tube. Right now I am looking for a suitable tube. If I ever find one and get my hubby to make it I will definitely let you know.