It’s been a week of firsts—my first latte art, and now my first time making felt! Granted, it was only a tiny swatch, but as my first foray into felting, it really felt good (har. har.).

Felting—or fulling, technically, in this case—involves taking a piece of knitting and applying heat, water and agitation to it so that the fibers lock together and become a piece of felt. This is often done in a washing machine, but since I have a front-loading machine which I can’t easily stop and restart mid-cycle to check the progress of my felt, I did my fulling by hand in the sink.

The idea of felting has intrigued me for a while, but I’ve never had the gumption to do it. It takes guts to put time and effort into knitting something—using nice wool, I might add, because only natural fibers will felt—and then to take that knitting, throw it into hot water and hope for the best. But a pattern for some tiny Christmasy felted things prompted me to try my hand at this felting lark. So I knitted up a swatch the other day:

Then I filled a bowl with hot water, slipped on some rubber gloves, and agitated my little swatch for all I was worth. Different yarns will felt at different rates, and I was lucky enough to be using very fuzzy yarn which started to felt almost right away. The piece initially expanded and went really floppy in the water, but after just a bit of rubbing it began to shrink and thicken up, until the individual stitches lost their definition and the fabric developed into a dense, uniform piece of felt. Success!

It’s quite a magical process, and I see how you could get addicted to it. It’s amazing to watch a delicate, pliable piece of knitting made from a very fine mohair yarn be transformed into a thick, remarkably tough piece of felt. I mean, you would really struggle to poke a hole through that thing—no wonder felting is so popular for making bags. Whether I’ll ever work up the courage to try to felt more than just a tiny little swatch remains to be seen, however. I’ll try a few more small pieces and see how it goes.