How to make your own prefelt for Needle Felting or Wet Felting
Prefelts are an excellent base for felt paintings, make lovely felt scarves, and can be used to cut out shapes and designs to add to any felting process. You can purchase prefelts from a number of suppliers, but you can also make your own prefelt, using either wet felting or needle felting.
Here’s a short little video for each process to show you how to make your own, custom prefelt:
Let's speed up the process and take a look at how to stab this needle felted prefelt into existence!
While I used a multiple needle holder for making this prefelt sample, you can do it with a single needle, you will just need to be more detailed in covering the entire surface of the wool in a close grid pattern. I worked with the needles twice on each side, changing the direction of the grid each time to maximize the coverage.
Let's speed up this wet felting...
After wetting down the fibers evenly, I used a very gentle massage over the netting to start a ‘skin’ to form on the top layers of fibers-no pressure, just a gentle touch. I then rolled the package a total of 100 times-again no pressure, just rolling, changing the direction once at the mid-point, or after 50 rolls. I did NOT rinse, nor did I shock the fibers (hot, cold, hot, cold) as the goal is prefelt, not full felting. The soap in the fibers will assist them in connecting with the other fibers you intend to felt with in your project.
