Making felted seats with young children | Creative STAR Learning
Beforehand I blogged about creating felt seats. These items are lightweight and transportable and consequently excellent for many outside pursuits on the go. I’ve ongoing to experiment with them. My very first attempts were rough and I figured out a good deal by means of demo and mistake. The earlier mentioned photo is my up coming hard work and I consider the method I’m utilizing is enhancing. I imagine it is superior for these performing with little ones at the early level who may possibly not have the endurance or toughness to build a comprehensive-sizing seat on their possess.
To begin with instead than building just one huge felt seat, I start out the procedure working with the ziplock bag method. This is less difficult on the palms and arms and a lot quicker function. You have to have a piece of bubble wrap too, minimize to healthy inside the bag.
Upcoming, I lower white merino wool tops and laid them out so that all the strands of wool run the very same way. I overlap the wool tops so that they felt with each other to make the mat. The white foundation layer is seriously useful for two good reasons. First white wool is much less expensive than dyed wool. Next it indicates I can see whether or not the colour covers it all in subsequent layers.
Up coming I insert one layer of colour, with the wool strands going vertical. Immediately after this I increase a mixture of warm h2o and actual soap, not detergent. In the earlier I really don’t feel I had the drinking water very hot enough. I now add drinking water that is sizzling to contact somewhat than heat. It appears to help.
Then I do a really gentle contact felt. I roll the bag up, squeeze the felt four moments in unique directions so that the wool fibres just commences to bond jointly but no far more. I designed 4 squares as illustrated beneath:
The upcoming phase was to felt these squares jointly. I flipped them more than so that they ended up on their white base with all the white wool fibres operating vertically. Then I included levels of horizontal color. I dampened them down in location with scorching h2o and cleaning soap and a tiny little bit of rubbing.
Then I flipped the massive mat over and included a lot more strands of wool to seal the joins concerning the items. Also I tried to fill incorporate more wool strands to any white gaps that could be found.
I then went by way of the method explained in the original article. Once more, I saved the water hotter than ahead of and included much more water than initially recommended. I made an energy to preserve the edges tidy and between every little bit of kneading and rolling I opened up the bubble wrap to examine and make adjustments. Then I washed the mat and remaining it to dry outside the house.
My seat undoubtedly was extra strong, felted and tidy when compared to preceding tries and starting the approach in a zip locked bag appeared to make a huge difference. Building a massive seat has been substantially much more manageable. The first photo demonstrates the joins which have certainly been worked nicely into the felting.
The 1 down facet of utilizing merino wool tops is the charge. Felted seats do use a good deal of wool. I reckon the higher than expense me £5 to make which is a good deal as opposed to a lot of other types of outdoor seats. Also with principal aged young children, there will be mistakes built, so it is an expensive venture. My future obstacle was to use heritage breed fleeces which I have sourced through my spouse and children so that these are no cost.
This article was at first printed in August 2014.