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.

Is it better to cut felt with a Cricut or a laser cutter?

For most home felt work, a Cricut-type blade cutter is the better choice: it cuts wool and acrylic felt alike, leaves a clean uncoloured edge and makes no smoke. A laser wins only on 100% wool felt that is too thick for a blade, or when you need detail finer than a blade can turn, and only if you can live with a darkened edge, the smell of burnt hair and the need to vent fumes outside.

	Electronic blade cutter (Cricut, Silhouette)	Laser cutter	Manual die cutter
Felts it cuts well	Wool, wool blend, acrylic (backed on drag-blade machines)	100% wool only	Wool and wool blend; acrylic with steel-rule dies
Practical thickness	About 1.5 mm easily, more with effort	Thick wool felt, in several passes if needed	3 to 5 mm with steel-rule dies
Edge	Clean, may be slightly fuzzy on acrylic	Darkened and slightly sealed on wool; a hard melted bead on synthetics	Clean and crisp
Shapes	Any file you draw or download	Any file, finest detail	Only the dies you own
Best at	One-offs and small batches of custom shapes	Fine detail and engraving on wool felt	Many identical shapes, several layers per pass
Fumes and smell	None	Burnt-hair smell on wool; harmful fumes from acrylic and polyester; needs extraction	None

Which Cricut cuts felt?

The machine matters more than the settings. The Cricut Maker models take a rotary blade, which rolls through the fibres like a rotary cutter, and Cricut lists felt among the unbacked fabrics it cuts on the FabricGrip mat. The Explore models use a drag blade, which pulls at loose fibres, so felt for those needs stabilising first: fusible interfacing ironed on the back, or freezer paper. That backing is also what makes the settings further down work on other drag-blade cutters.

Laser cutting felt safely

Know what your felt is made of before it goes in a laser. Wool chars rather than melts, which is why it cuts. Most cheap craft felt is acrylic or polyester, often recycled plastic bottle fibre, and it melts and gives off fumes that need extraction to the outside, not a fan in the room. If the label does not say, do the burn test on a scrap first, and check your laser's own list of approved materials.

Can you cut felt with a die cutting machine?

Yes, and for thicker wool felt a manual die cutter is the easiest machine there is, provided you use the right kind of die. The machine only supplies pressure; the die does the cutting.

• Steel-rule dies are a real blade, bent to shape and set upright in a wooden or foam-filled block. They are tall and sharp enough to cut felt in one pass, often several layers at once, and they are what fabric and felt die sets usually are.
• Thin wafer dies (etched or thin metal dies made for paper and card) have a very shallow cutting edge. They will cut thin wool or wool-blend felt, about 1 mm, but acrylic felt tends to come out with patches of fibre still joining the shape to the sheet.

To get thin dies to cut felt:

1. Use wool or wool-blend felt, or felt stiffened with fusible interfacing on the back.
2. Add a shim: a sheet of paper or thin card in the plate sandwich adds the little extra pressure felt needs.
3. Run it through twice, turning the sandwich round for the second pass.
4. Snip any joined fibres with small scissors rather than tearing the shape free.

Any manual die-cutting machine, including the budget and store-brand ones, can cut felt this way if it takes the dies. The thing to check is not the machine's name but its manual: steel-rule dies are much taller than wafer dies, and a compact machine built for wafer dies may not take them, or may need a different plate arrangement. If it lists steel-rule or "thick" dies as compatible, it will cut felt well.

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.