Wet felt training with pure wool
Crafty corner have been involved in a project to upskill 6 crafters on the art of felting with pure wool.
The idea was to take 6 unemployed individuals from the Vereeniging community of Sharpville and to teach them how to make various products from pure wool.
This is an awesome community and teaching them has been an absolute pleasure.
The training course runs over 6 weeks and took them from the absolute beginning of learning the various types of wool from mohair to marino and saw them developing their skills and then learning to dye their own colours and eventually making their own slippers and hats!
After all the hard work and commitment you have to have a party and celabrate your achievements! This was a great team of motivated and creative individuals that have a great passion of learning.
Types of wool and how to use them
We started off learning the types of wools and how to use them for various products. We even took already spun wool and dry felted these awesome flowers from it!!
Needle felting
Needle felting is quite a process but the results are super rewarding and you can make and do almost anything with a bit of wool and some time! The team had fun trying to make shapes and not bleed all over the projects. The needels are super sharp and when you get carried away with your project it is easy to get distracted and prick your fingers!
We also had fun needle felting onto denim for a stunning upcycling way to fix up old cloths or add another dimension to your boring clothes.
Spun wool is not meant for the purpose of dry felting but rather for knitting and crochet but the object of this training is to create out of the box thinkers and to grow them into skilled crafters that test the limits with everything!
Our first week we made jewellery and really got to know our types of wool and uses! A little bit of imagination goes a long way and with the right inspiration and training you will be amazed at how awesome the results can be!
Take a look at these amazing creations that were made in just one week of needle felt techniques and practice.
We have learned how to use a design for our shapes and also how to make our own templates to create shapes. Lots of fun and wow moments later and we are ready for bigger and greater things
After a period of shape building using the needle felting technique and dry felt as a medium we are well practised and eager to try new things.
We spend some time learning the colour wheel and how to create any colour from our basic primary and black wood dyes.
After perfecting the skills of mixing colours and understanding how the original colour of the wool effects the colours we are ready to put our new learned skills to the test. We started off with yellow as it is a pre mixed colour and we don’t have to get to adventurous on our first dye batch. Dying wool is quite a process and its amazing to see such awesome results. Dying wool take a lot of practice and is a very precise skill as you need to be exact to get the same colour each time. If you not to worried about the colour variation you wont have as big an issues but as this community are going into production it is imperative that they get the colours correct each time.
After a few days of practice and lots of cool colours later our community group is ready for the challenge of wet felting and the awesome products that can easily be made from wool!
We are going to go all out and make a flower for our very first attempt at wet felting!!
As wet felting is a long process and takes a lot of learning how to get the exact results you require we are not overly expectant to get great results the first attempt. The idea here is to get feel of the wet felting process and how to keep all your layers together while getting the layers to bind together and create a felted fabric.
As expected we got flowers but they were a little distorted in shape and some of the flowers were over worked in the process so lost some definition. This re-instilled the need to learn to needle felt with dry wool as you can use your felting needle to fix up or add to any wet felted project!
Not a bad result!!
We spend a few days making flowers and within a week we have progressed to these!
Crafty corner felt training course is designed to take you from the absolute begging to a complete felt crafter. This course is run in communities to help uplift them and create job opportunities. All of these crafters will sell their products eventually so they really need to have a good grasp of the full felting range of products that can be made.
After doing the decorative and basic felting products its time to start learning how to fold over the edges and create seamless joins. We start this process with a small pouch as our first project. This process requires using a resist to prevent all the felt for sticking together when making the pouch.
We spend a few weeks with this technique and once we have the concept we can start with much more detailed colour blending and taking the wet felting from a craft to a professional product.
This wet felt course really teaches you everything you need to know about felting and after only 6 weeks our crafters were making their own hats, slippers and even boots!!
Take a look at our gallery of picture and see what amazing products were produced.
Katleho sporting his blue robinhood hat
Marshall wearing his awesome light blue hat.
