Hot water turns fluff to felt

A few weeks back, we gave you instructions for making a fabulous dry-felted flower (you can read the story at www.newsobserver.com/lifestyles/home_garden/notions/index.html). This week, we go up to our elbows in sudsy water to make a wet-felted ball.

The idea behind felting is that you take a fluff of fiber and turn it into a sturdy fabric. This works with wool because the sheep's fiber has little scales on it, and felting -- agitating the fibers, as with the needle in dry felting -- causes the cutin, or scales, of wool to get stuck together.

In wet felting, the water opens up the scales, so they bond more closely than with dry felting. After the fibers are bonded, drying closes the little scales, making a sturdy fabric suitable for slippers, hats and yurts.

Let's get started

Cynthia Deis, owner of Ornamentea and Panopolie, both in Raleigh, is our guide for this segment of felting, as she was with the flower. To make the rainbow ball, you need: water and a container to put it in, detergent ("the cheaper, the better," Deis says), various colors of wool fluff, or roving (see Details), and a goodly amount of patience.

Note that there are different methods of making this little ball. We'll use the at-the-table-with-a-smallish-bucket method.

Fill the bucket with water as hot as your hands can stand. Squeeze in a bit of detergent.

Pull off a small amount of roving and roll it between your palms to make a ball. Then pull off some more roving in a different color and wrap it around the center color. When the ball is about 2 inches in diameter, take it for a swim.

Holding the ball with your fingers, plunge it into the water and, holding it in a ballish shape, swish it around.

"It kind of looks like an accident," Deis says. "How can this be what I want to do?"

Just keep doing it.

Squeeze it as you swish it around. What you're doing is simultaneously agitating and compressing the ball.

As the water opens up the fiber ("like a pine cone," Deis says), your swishing and squeezing force the fibers to bond.

When the ball feels tight, wrap more dry wool around it, then swish it around more. Continue this process of felting until the ball is solid, then add another layer of colored dry wool.

"Make sure the layers are thick enough that you can see them when you cut it," Deis says.

As you add layers, "the outside layer feels really loose like it's going to fall off," Deis says. Persist in squeezing.

Patience, please

You can use both hands, one hand, switch hands. It sounds like a thing a kid would love to do -- splashing in water and squeezing a doughy thing. But it takes a patient child to see it through to the end. It takes an hour or more to make a 4-inch ball.

"Your mind can wander," Deis says. "I'm trying the mindfulness thing: actually literally thinking about the feeling of the wool, etc."

Yeah.

Deis scrubs the ball against her hand, to agitate it more.

Deis' elemental ornamental nature emerges and she felts a small orange circle. She puts it on the soapy ball, but it slides off. She secures it with a strap of blue fiber and felts more.

"Precision is not an option with wet felting," she notes.

After rassling with the slipped disk a bit, Deis rinses the ball in cool running water and decides that the stringy blue fleece and the decorative disk just aren't making friends.

"The dot doesn't want to stick," she says. "Sometimes dyes change the fiber surfaces or maybe the wool came from sheep with longer, thicker fibers.

"It's an art, not a science," she says, swathing the whole ball in a layer of green and rolling it a bit, "like rolling a meatball."