Making A Wet Felted Flower Picture {Saturday Artist}

This week, we had lots of soapy, mess making with a nice big stack of rainbow coloured roving!
Read on and you can make your very own :)

First select some natural wool roving.

• Tease out some thinish strips of base colour roving onto a sushi mat.
• Place the first layer of wool roving in vertical strips to form a squareish shape.
• Place the second layer of roving horizontally over the first.
• Place the third layer vertically over the second.

Tease out the pieces of felt you want to use for your design. Make sure that they are not too thick as they won't bind to the base so well.
Lay them over the base in the pattern you want.

{tip}... Choose a simple design as the colours will merge a little during the felt making process.

Cover the design with a piece of netting. Spray a generous amounts of soap over the netting. Rub and "mush" the felt for around ten minutes. {Really invest in this part of the project, it makes all the difference to the end result}

The littest kids loved this "soap mushing" part! It is so tactile!

Remove the netting carefully and lay your design in the sink. Carefully dribble boiling water over the design. This will help bind the fibres together. You will want to be careful at this stage as the pressure of the water can distort the design.

Allow your felt to cool before rolling it up in the sushi mat. Squeeze out the excess water and soap.

Roll, squeeze, rinse repeat...Continue to rinse your rolled up felt under a hot tap till the water runs clear. Carefully unwrap the felt and hang it over a radiator to dry.

Now trim the edges of the felt to neaten them up. Or leve them frayed if you like them more natural :)Once completly dry you can frame your felt, embroider it, embelish it with sequins, buttons and the like, cut it into place mats or coasters or cut it up to make garlands...

My daughter embellished her felt with a little embroidery.



Blanket stitch neatens up the edges nicely. The girls made simple three plied cords to hang them...



A pretty Spring decoration!



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