the felting tests

So, last night I decided to try wet felting beads as was suggested to me on flicker as being much faster than needle felting them. Here are my oh so scientific results…
felted beads
First, I just took a bit of roving & under hot water rubbed it into a ball, shocking it from time to time in cold water. This did felt pretty quickly but didn’t seem to create a nice solid ball, there were cracks in it. Then I needle felted the same amount of roving just a little bit to give it shape before rolling it into a ball under hot water. This worked beautifully, a nice tight round ball. On the next one, I added a little dish soap & it felted even faster & better. The three beads above are from roving. Then i decided to try it with yarn. I used a little nashua creative focus which is a chunky barely plied yarn. I needle felted it a little.
brown beads before felting
then into the sink & a little soap & there you go…
brown beads after felting
Next, I tried nashua julia which is a worsted weight (I think) plied yarn. Same thing needle felted it just a little.
blue bead before felting
then wet felted
blue bead after felting
Once again a beautiful result. Both yarns have a little mohair in them so the beads are a little hairy. I‘ll try some yarn tonight that doesn’t have any to see how it looks, but this is definitely the way I‘ll make beads in the future as these took almost no time at all. Also I found the water didn’t need to be that hot, I wasn’t wearing gloves (I didn’t have any) & used a water temperature I could stand. This morning, I had a row of pretty little beads all dry, solid & ready to use.

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17 years ago by in Crafts | You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
3 Comments to the felting tests
    • Scarlett
    • Thanks for stopping by my blog. Sorry, about your friend’s untimely death. I have lost too many people and it is really a hard thing to recover from.

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