Can You Wet Felt After Needle Felting? Yes — and Here Is What Changes

The two methods are usually taught as separate crafts, which leaves people assuming they cannot be mixed. They can, and most experienced work mixes them. The only thing worth getting right is the order.

Why it works

Both methods do the same thing to the wool. A barbed needle drags fibres past each other mechanically; hot water, soap and friction let the scales slide and catch. The result in both cases is tangled, locked fibre.

So a needle felted piece is simply partly felted wool. Put it in hot soapy water and it carries on felting, by the other route.

What wet felting does to a needled piece

• It shrinks. 10 to 25%, depending on how dense the piece already was. Loosely needled work shrinks dramatically; a hard, well-felted sculpture barely moves.
• It hardens. Wet felting compacts wool more thoroughly than needling does. A piece that felt firm dry can end up genuinely rigid.
• It smooths. Needle holes close, loose surface fibres lie down, and the pitted look of coarse-needle work disappears. This is the main reason people do it.
• It softens detail. Sharp creases round off, small raised features flatten, and fine lines blur.
• Colours bleed slightly where a strong dye sits against a pale one.

When to do it

Good reasons

• To harden a piece that has to take handling — a bowl, a bag, a toy, anything that will be squeezed.
• To smooth a rough surface without hours of 40 gauge finishing.
• To lock a needled design onto fabric so it survives washing. A short wet stage over needled wool grips the base far more firmly than needling alone — see needle felting on fabric.
• To join parts permanently. Wet felting fuses a needled join into one continuous fabric.

Bad reasons

• To fix a shape you dislike. Water makes wool more compliant, not more forgiving. A badly proportioned animal comes out a smaller badly proportioned animal.
• On anything with fine features already finished. Faces, eyes, whiskers, thin ears and delicate spots will not survive intact.
• On a piece with a wire armature. Water gets in, the wool shrinks around the wire unevenly, and non-aluminium wire can rust and stain from inside. See wire armature for needle felting.

How to do it

1. Wet the piece in hot soapy water and squeeze gently to push water through the middle.
2. Work the surface with light pressure at first, rolling the piece in your palms or rubbing across it with a flat hand.
3. Increase pressure gradually as it tightens.
4. Check the size often. This is the step people skip, and shrinkage accelerates near the end.
5. Rinse in cool water, squeeze — never wring — and reshape while damp.
6. Dry completely. Two days for anything solid; wool holds water in the centre long after the surface feels dry.

Support the shape while it dries — stuff a hollow piece, stand a sculpture upright, pin a flat panel out square. Wet felt keeps whatever form it dries in.

The more useful order: wet first, needle second

Reverse the sequence and most of the problems vanish. Wet felt the form, dry it, then needle detail onto a stable, smooth, fully shrunk surface.

This is how almost all felted pictures are built — a wet felted background with needled trees, birds and fences added afterwards, as in wet felting art. It is also how many sculptors work: a hollow wet felted body over a resist, then needled features. Nothing you add can shrink away, because the shrinking already happened.

A rule of thumb

Wet felting is for form and strength. Needle felting is for detail and precision. Do them in that order and they cooperate; do them the other way round and the first fights the second.

The one exception is deliberate: needle felt a rough shape as a fast, controllable core, then wet felt it hard, then needle the detail on. Three stages, and it produces the toughest small sculptures there are.