About Felting

Making felt is a very ancient craft.  Items such as shoes, carpets, clothing, art objects, hats and jewellery can all be made using felting techniques.  Felt is made without sewing or weaving and is a non-woven fabric. There are two main techniques that can be used when felting: Wet Felting and Needle Felting. 

Wet Felting

Wet felting relies on the unique properties of wool and its propensity to matt together and shrink under friction, moisture and heat. When wool is subjected to friction its fibres will shrink and matt together. The use of hot and cold water alternately will speed up this process. Flat pieces of felt can be made in this way and three dimensional pieces can also be made using wet felting by molding the layers of wool around an object or pattern shape.

Autumn leaves on trunk made using wet felting technique. Created for exhibition at RDS Dublin 2007.

Needle Felting

Needle felting is a technique that uses an extremely sharp, barbed needle. The carded wool fleece (called Batting)  is laid down in layers and  as the needle is pushed into the fibres, the barbs pull the fibres through each other and matt them together. This means that the fibres link together and in this way both flat and three dimensional pieces can be made. I make felt creatures and characters using this technique. This is done by gathering the batting  fibres into the shape I need and then pushing  the felting needle through the fibres lots of times until the desired shape and texture are achieved.

About the Sculptures

Each creation you see on this site has been individually sculpted. There is no sewing involved in constructing the piece. There is no stuffing or painting on of the features etc. Even the fine lines around the eyes are lengths of wool fibres felted into the piece. The only sewing used is to create bead necklaces or sew buttons onto the clothing etc. to add realistic detail. 

All designs published on this site are the intellectual property of Clare Ballard and should not be copied for commercial purposes.