What do you felt with?

 The one thing felters get asked on a very regular basis, is "What do you felt with?"  A question, which could be answered by a very long essay, or a very short answer.  The short answer is anything you can lay your hands on.  The long answer, begins with.......what am I creating.

This is some of my felting gear on my favourite felting surface.....the breakfast bar.  I use a large variety of materials, purpose chosen for the felting activity.  I will always finish off all my felt, by rolling in a strong cotton fabric, I use some cheap old denim I picked up.  I will only use olive oil to felt with.......my hands demand it and so does the quality of the felt I produce.

Love my water ball or felting pear, so glad that I found a supplier years ago in Germany.  Love my Wolfgang!  I always use a nice ceramic bowl for my water, keeps the heat, great size and looks pretty to boot.

But what do you roll on??  I have used bamboo blinds, bubble wrap, non slip mat, thin plastic and  synthetic fabric.  I can use a couple of these in one session, we all have our favourites and sometimes want to speed up or slow down the process.

The two things I am currently in love with are pictured below.

 These are both types of flooring, which are fabulous in the fulling process.  The above pic is not the best, as the ridges are fairly close together and hard to photograph.  The pic below is a lot clearer.  Both are super at speeding up the process, but you need to be ready to full!  I like to wet my surfaces down with a bit of soapy water before I start.

The one downfall with these two mats, are the fact that they stank really badly of rubber when I bought them and they kept the smell for quite a while.  They did loose it, but it took a bit.  They can be purchased from hardware stores by the metre, but aren't the cheapest.  Probably about $35+ per metre, but well worth the investment.  I only bought a half metre of each one.