Felt Session 1: Introduction

Whether you're looking to make a larger home deck project, or you want just a really fun, fast, little felt project to sew by hand, this class is going to show you how to do all of those things. I'm going to talk a little bit about the different types of felt. So when you're looking at felt depending on where you're buying your felt from, it can have a different fiber content. Different fiber content in your in your felt is going to make it act differently and make some of it better for certain projects versus another. So the most easy to find, readily available type of felt that you can find in craft and fabric stores, big box stores even carry it, and of course you can find it online is your 100% acrylic felt.

So as you can see, it comes in so many different color varieties, tons to pick from. There's never going to be a shortage of acrylic felt that you can find. Within your acrylic felt there are some other attributes of your felt that you can find. One of that is, the thickness or the quality of the felt. Now, depending on the manufacturer or the brand of that felt it's going to be labeled one or two different ways.

One, is having it called craft felt versus premium felt. And that is for one brand. Another brand actually labels it by size. So you will actually have it on your label. So it'd be labeled by thickness, and you can tell by feel as well, but sometimes if you're really in a hurry and you just want to grab one and look at the label it'll say it's either a one millimeter or two millimeter.

They even go up to a three millimeter felt. So if you can't tell by the tag or you've already removed your tag and maybe this felt is just in your sewing room, in your stash somewhere, you definitely can tell by feel and even looking at it. So this one here on the right is much thinner than this one here on the left. So again, this is one millimeter, and this is two millimeter. Or, if you are using a different brand and they labeled it differently, this would be craft felt and this would be premium felt.

So there's definitely a difference in thickness and it also can affect how your projects come together. So if you are working on something say you want to make a pillow or something that you plan to stuff or there's going to be any kind of pull or wear on that project, you definitely want to be using the thicker felt or the premium felt, because this thinner felt tends to stretch a little bit and distort. And once it stretches there really is no way to put it back together. Unlike other fabrics you may be used to, woven fabrics, knit fabrics, things like that, felt is made by all of these fibers just sort of being compressed together. Which means there's no grain, there's no weave to the fabric but it does mean that if you start to pull it apart it will stay pulled apart and it will not go back together.

So if there's, again, any sort of wear and tear are going to be happening on your felt you definitely want to make sure that you're using that thicker felt or the premium felt. Also still within your acrylic felt family, there are several different ways that you can get your felt. One of which, is something like this. This looks the same as any other piece of felt but it is actually sticky back felt. So it looks the same on the front, but on the back, it has this paper coating.

It's like a wax paper coating. And if you want to use this on a project and say you cut out shapes and then you want to just simply stick them onto something before you sew, you just peel this backing off and you can see it's shiny. It's got it sticky back already on there. And then it sticks right to whatever you want to put it on. So this can be a really fun, quick and easy way if you're doing maybe some felt crafts or some felt projects with kids and you don't necessarily want to worry about either having them hand sew something in place or using something like glue, you can actually buy your felt already with sticky back in place.

Another type of felt again, still within our acrylic felt family is stiffened felt. So this is something that's really good if you're going to make sort of a bowl or a dish, which is actually one of the projects we're going to make a little later on. You don't have to use different felt for it. But if you're making a project that you want to have some stability to it, and you don't want to have to try and figure out how to stiffen your felt on your own, then you will want to buy this stiffened felt. So you can see if you hold it up, it's going to stay up on its own.

It's not flopping down at all. It's really, really stiff, stiffened felt and you can get this in plain colors, and of course you can get it in some really fun prints as well. Speaking of fun prints, felt comes in a number of different kinds of prints. You can find polka dots, you can find stripes, you can find other fun prints that are printed right onto the top of felt. If you're going to be using something like this where you have a definite pattern that is printed on the top of the felt, if you're just going to be cutting small pieces from it then you can just sort of pick, you know the motif that you want to focus on and cut that from your felt.

But if you are planning on say using the entire 8.5"x11" or 9"x12" or whatever size your sheet is, and you want to make sure you're going to be using this entire piece, you want to check your, quality check your felt first to make sure that the design was printed straight and that it was printed on the entire piece. So I have two pieces here. These are the same pattern that have been printed same size and everything. And you can see that one of these looks really nice. And one of them kind of got off a little bit when they were printing.

When they are printing these designs on felt, they kind of just run it through. It's almost like printing an image on paper and if it's not lined up perfectly you can end up with these little imperfections in your felt. So again, if you want to use the entire whole sheet of felt, you might want to check it first to make sure your design covers your entire area. Now, if you're going to be making a small project any of these pieces of felt work great for whatever it is you're making. And all of these craft-sized felts will work for all of the projects that we're going to do later on in this class.

If you are looking at this and you're thinking that you want to make a much bigger project you can actually buy felt on the roll. Not all stores carry it. You may actually have to buy it online. And it's generally a blended felt. So I brought just small samples of blended felt so I didn't have to bring in a whole roll.

But blended felt is usually a blend of wool and acrylic. So it's going to have the softness associated with the acrylic felt, but it's going to stand up better and be a little bit more sturdy, which is normally what you associate with that wool felt. So again, this is just a small sample size of the blended felt, but you can find it on the rolls if you're needing much larger pieces. Going the next step further in terms of quality and also in terms of price, going up is getting a hundred percent Merino wool felt. So this, it'll normally come labeled.

So if you don't know by feel how to determine the different types of felt definitely just check the label. It will be on here somewhere on your packaging but you can get felt in the same sort of sheets that you can your craft felt, or you can get them in much smaller cuts like this, which can help cut down on the price since a hundred percent wool felt is a little bit more expensive. And then you can definitely tell by feel that it is your wool felt versus your acrylic felt. So if you think about maybe a wool sweater you have and sometimes it's a little bit scratchy or a little bit stiff, that's kind of what this wool felt feels like. So that's sort of the number one indicator of which felt if it's not labeled how you can tell the difference.

And so keep that in mind, when you are picking your felt for the projects that you want to make. If it's something that you're going to be wearing like an accessory, a bracelet cuff, something like that, you might want it to have the softness of the acrylic. So you want acrylic or the blend. Whereas if you're making something like one of the fabric bowls we'll be making later and you're not worried about how soft it feels but you want the stability in the felt, then you're gonna go with your 100% wool felt. So that's all the different kinds of felt that we will be talking about today and that we'll be using in some of our projects.

Just a quick overview too of some of the other supplies we're going to be needing throughout this class. If you want to be making some projects along with me, of course we're going to be needing some pins and some needles cause we're going to be doing some sewing. Certain times if depending on the pin you're using, if you are finding that your pin is kind of getting lost in the felt because you have really tiny, really thin, say silk pins, you can actually substitute your pins for binder clips. Those will work a lot of the times instead of using pins. So you have either option, you'll be just fine.

I always like to have sort of a sample pack of a bunch of different types of needles and different sizes of needles. When it comes to felt, hand sewing felt is a little bit different than when you are hand sewing another fabric. Say if you're working with a tightly woven cotton and you're worried about the size of hole that your needle is going to leave in that cotton and that's why you pick a needle with a really small eye or a really thin needle you don't really have those same worries when you're working with felt, because it is so easy to sew through. So you really, you can choose any size of needle that you are comfortable sewing with or that just makes sewing, hand sewing for you a little bit easier. Of course, we're going to be needing some thread.

In general, when you're sewing, people say that you need to match your fiber content of your thread to the fiber content of whatever it is you're sewing, that doesn't necessarily fall true with felt. I usually do all of my sewing on felt either by hand or machine, with either just all purpose thread which is a cotton polyester blend or I'll use a hundred percent cotton thread. It's what I have on hand all the time and it works just fine with any kind of the projects we're going to be using today. Other things that can make hand sewing with felt, or just with any fabric, really a little bit easier is a thimble, if you want a thimble. And then of course having some kind of thread conditioner this is just one of the many different types that you can find and that just sort of conditions your thread and keeps it from tangling up.

You're going to need a way to cut your felt. I like to use both rotary cutters and scissors depending on the size of piece that I'm cutting out and whether or not it's a straight line. Scissors work well for any odd shape you're going to be cutting. But if it's a straight line, I like to always use a rotary cutting mat, a ruler, and my rotary cutter. It just makes it much quicker and easier.

You're also going to need a way to mark your felt. So grab your marking pen or pencil of choice. Actually in our next section I'll be talking about tips on marking fabric, felt in particular. So I will tell you which one I prefer and how I like to mark my felt. So grab either which one you prefer or once you watch the next section you can decide which one that will work best for you.

And those are the basic supplies you're going to need. So get the felt that you want to use whether it's the acrylic, the blend, or the wool, get your sewing supplies, your cutting supplies, marketing supplies, and we're going to move right into some tips on working with felt.