Ok, an unusual title and I have read virtually every felting topic over the past weeks
Many of you know I am knitting up a floor rug. The yarns are very feltable…so for example joining yarns using the spit/felt process is ultra quick and easy.
I’d like to felt the rug a little. It is taking quite some time to make so I really don’t want my floor rug to turn out the size of a hand towel
So, as I said, I want the rug to felt a little…just to muzz the surface etc…but not felt to the degree say booga bags are done.
I know from seeing other threads that one can felt for small periods and check and check BUT I am wondering about the ability to flat felt. Obviously I will experiment with a swatch but I am imagining putting the rug on a flat surface with towels underneath…squirting the surface madly with hot water and then really rubbing the life out of it with hands or an implement. Turning over the doing the same.
I feel I will be better able to control shrinkage but perhaps it’s not a practical idea at all.
I know that if one part of the fabric isn’t felting as well as the rest of it, you can use hot water and a lot of rubbing on that particular section, and that will help speed along the felt process. So I think that if you want to use this method to felt your rub a little bit, it should work. There’s certainly no harm in trying, since you’re able to have full control of the felting and you’ll be able to keep an eye on it the entire time since it’s all by hand. Seems like it should work, to me.
[FONT=“Georgia”]Well…
I don’t always felt with my washing machine. I go the long ( But very exacting and, in the end, beneficial) way and wet the fabric in warm water and use a bought-for-felting toothbrush to fuzz it up. I like this because I can control how I want it to turn out and the piece looks much more even. So yeah, it should work, but the tooth brush is faster than just using your hands.[/FONT]
How big is this rug? I can’t imagine hand felting an 8x10 rug. Now a smaller say throw rug might be doable. If it were me though I’d probably do it in the washer, but keep a close eye on it. When it looked like I wanted I’d let the water out and fill with cold and then rinse. You could spin it gently.
I have NOT done this though so I’m not really sure.
I think I will come back to the thread when I am done because I’m not too sure how big this rug will be. I can never quite tell when stitches are bunched up on circs and the other dimension will be governed by when I run out of yarn but I suspect that at most this will be a small rug of say 3 by 3 and thus very doable with a toothbrush or similar - great idea! If I made a bigger rug I’d have to do it in squares or strips. I bought yarn on sale and so just went for this to make maximum use of what I bought but I got just about all they had!
I have read somewhere that it is possible to felt in a large container, maybe even the bathtub using hot water and a plunger for activation. Have not tried it so don’t know if it really works.
Now a smaller say throw rug might be doable. If it were me though I’d probably do it in the washer, but keep a close eye on it. When it looked like I wanted I’d let the water out and fill with cold and then rinse. You could spin it gently.