Felt Cutting Machines: Die Cutters, Blades and Lasers

Felt is a non-woven: fibres locked together in every direction with no threads to follow. That means no fraying and no grain to fight, which is why it cuts into fine shapes that would be impossible in woven fabric — and also why a blunt blade pushes the fibres aside instead of cutting them.

The four machine types

Electronic cutting machines (Cricut, Silhouette, Brother ScanNCut)

A small drag knife on a moving carriage. Best for thin craft felt and intricate shapes.

• Thickness: up to about 1.5 mm reliably; 3 mm with a knife blade and many passes.
• Blade: deep-point (black housing) at minimum. A fabric-specific blade kept for felt only lasts far longer than a shared one.
• Mat: strong grip. Felt lifts, and lifted felt tears.
• Backing: the single biggest improvement. Fuse lightweight interfacing to the back, or press freezer paper on shiny side down. Stabilised felt cuts like card.
• Passes: two at medium pressure beats one at maximum, which chews the mat.

Manual die cutters (Sizzix Big Shot, Gemini, Ellison)

A steel-rule die rolled through a press. Crude in principle and excellent in practice.

• Cuts 3–5 mm wool felt in one pass, cleanly, with no settings to get wrong.
• Cuts several layers at once — four sheets of 1 mm felt is normal.
• Limited to the shapes you own dies for, which is the whole trade-off.
• Custom steel-rule dies can be made for a repeated shape and pay for themselves in production.

Laser cutters

• Wool felt: cuts cleanly at low power, edges very slightly darkened and sealed. Smells of burnt hair. Needs extraction.
• Acrylic and polyester felt: melts rather than cuts, leaving a hard glazed bead, and releases fumes you do not want in a small room.
• Blends: the worst of both. If you do not know what your felt is, the burn test takes thirty seconds.
• Engraving works on wool felt for shallow surface texture, though contrast is low.

Industrial knife tables

Oscillating or drag knives on a vacuum bed — Zünd, Esko and similar. This is what cuts thick technical felt, gaskets, piano felts and rug pads, from 5 mm up to several centimetres. Out of reach for a home workshop, but many laser and CNC bureaux offer it as a cutting service, which is worth knowing if you need fifty identical 8 mm shapes.

Settings that work on a home cutter

Start here and adjust; every machine and every felt differs.

• 1 mm acrylic craft felt — deep-point blade, "felt" or "fleece" material setting, 2 passes, strong-grip mat.
• 1 mm wool felt — as above but one pressure step higher; wool is denser than it looks.
• 2 mm wool felt — deep-point blade, custom setting at maximum pressure, 3 passes, fused interfacing backing.
• 3 mm+ — knife blade with a machine that supports it, multiple passes, taped down at the edges. Or use a die cutter instead.

Two rules that save more material than any setting: test on a 3 cm square of the actual felt first, and change the blade far sooner than you think. Felt fibres wrap around a blade shaft and stall it.

Which felt cuts best

• Wool-blend felt (35–70% wool) — the sweet spot. Dense, stable, cuts crisply, holds fine detail.
• 100% wool felt — cuts beautifully but is softer, so very fine points can distort. Excellent for anything 3 mm and above.
• Acrylic craft felt — cheapest, fluffiest, and the fibres drag. Backing is essential.
• Stiffened / bonded felt — cuts like card and is the easiest of all, at the cost of drape.
• Hand-felted sheets — uneven thickness defeats a set blade depth. Cut these by hand.

What each of these actually is, and what to buy by the metre, is in wool felt fabric.

Finishing a machine-cut edge

Felt does not fray, so a cut edge needs nothing. Two exceptions:

• A fuzzy edge on acrylic felt can be tidied with a quick pass of a lint roller or a light singe — carefully, and only on wool.
• Very fine tendrils (letters, lace patterns) hold their shape better if the piece is pressed under a cloth with a warm iron afterwards.

What machine cutting is for

Repetition and precision: appliqué shapes, felt food components, garland letters, identical animal parts, product runs for a shop. It is not a substitute for scissors on a one-off — setting up a cut takes longer than cutting one heart by hand.

For sewn and stitched work on cut shapes, see felt appliqué, and for machine-stitched decoration on felt, felt machine embroidery designs. If what you want is a machine that makes felt rather than cuts it, that is the felting machine guide.