Everything sold as felt by the metre came off one of three machines. A needle loom entangles the web, a hardening plate shrinks it, and a calender presses it to thickness.
4 min read
Felt is the easiest fabric an embroidery machine will ever meet — no fraying, no grain, and it is its own stabiliser. Almost. The two places it goes wrong are density and hooping.
4 min read
A fedora, a trilby and a homburg are three different hats, and the difference is measurable in centimetres of brim. What each shape does for a face, and how to size one properly.
6 min read
Charcoal reads as neutral, brown reads as warm, and black reads as formal whether you meant it to or not. How felt takes dye, and which shades survive sunlight.
3 min read
Wool smoulders, smells of burnt hair and crushes to ash. Polyester melts into a hard bead. Thirty seconds and one loose fibre tells you what you actually bought.
3 min read
A handful of firms still block their own felt. Everyone else buys bodies from the same few mills. What the names mean, what to expect at each price, and where to buy in Australia or on Amazon.
4 min read
A hat band changes the hat more than anything else you can buy for it. The rest of the list is care equipment — and two items on it save a hat that would otherwise be ruined.
3 min read
Felt has no grain and no weave, which makes it ideal for machine cutting and awful for a blade that expects resistance. Which machine cuts which thickness, and the settings that actually work.
7 min read
Two different things go by this name — a felt tote in the Birkin silhouette, and the felt organiser that sits inside a real one. Both come down to how stiff the felt is.
4 min read Advanced
Fibre enters at the hopper and leaves as a web at the doffer. Between them sit the licker-in, the cylinder, the workers and strippers and the fancy — each doing one job to the fibre as it passes.
4 min read
A felt slipper is only as good as the wool it is made of and the sole it is joined to. How to tell boiled wool from needled felt, which soles last, which footbeds actually hold an arch, and why Nordic slippers feel so different.
6 min read
The mat is not padding. Its ridges grip the wool through the plastic and shear it slightly with every roll, and that shear is what turns a fragile web into fabric.
3 min read Beginner
Sculpt wool into animals, figures and decorations with barbed needles. Start with the basics, then work up to armatures, faces and fine detail.
Warm water, soap and friction turn loose fibre into solid fabric. Learn layouts, shrinkage and resists for scarves, soaps, vessels and flat felt.
Felt merino through open-weave fabric to create light, drapey textiles. Fabric choice, fibre weight and migration, explained clearly.
Complete makes with photos at every stage — animals, flowers, ornaments and home decorations, sorted by how much experience they need.
Printable templates, measurements and shaping guides you can follow exactly, or adapt once you know what the shapes are doing.
The core techniques, one skill at a time — each written as a sequence you can follow at the table with wool in your hands.
Fixes for the things that go wrong: fuzzy surfaces, broken needles, wool that will not felt, and shapes that refuse to hold.
The knitting side of working with wool — leaf patterns, casting on, needle sizes and knitting faster — including the pieces that go on to be felted.
Why leaves fall when they do, what a cobweb actually is, and the seasonal makes that follow from both.
What to do with the pumpkin once it is carved — cooking from fresh, including the parts most people throw away.
