Felting with Dog Hair: Preparing Fur That Actually Felts

Dog hair felts. It is the basis of chiengora, a genuine fibre tradition, and a brushed-out husky produces more usable fibre in a season than most people know what to do with.

Whether it works for you depends almost entirely on one thing: which part of the coat you have collected.

Undercoat versus guard hair

Double-coated dogs have two kinds of hair.

• Undercoat — soft, fine, crimped, and covered in a scaled surface much like wool. This felts.
• Guard hair — long, straight, coarse and smooth. This does not felt, and mixed in quantity it works its way out of finished pieces as prickly whiskers.

What comes out of a deshedding brush during a moult is nearly all undercoat, which is exactly what you want. What comes off a clipper or a groomer's table is a mixture, and needs sorting.

Which dogs

• Excellent: husky, samoyed, malamute, chow chow, keeshond, german shepherd, collie, newfoundland, golden retriever, pyrenean.
• Workable: poodle and doodle coats (fine but curly and short), spaniels, corgis.
• Poor: greyhound, whippet, boxer, dobermann, dalmatian — short single coats with almost no undercoat at all.

Fibre length matters as much as breed. Anything under about 2 cm is hard to felt alone and needs blending with wool.

Collecting it

Brush during a moult, when the undercoat comes away in clouds. Store it dry in a paper bag or a breathable box — never a sealed plastic bag, which traps moisture and makes it smell.

You need more than you think: about 30 g for a small keepsake ornament, 100 g and up for anything substantial. That is several weeks of a heavy-moulting dog.

Washing — do not skip this

Unwashed fur carries skin oils and dander that smell strongly the moment they get warm and damp, which is precisely what felting involves.

1. Fill a basin with hot water and a little washing-up liquid or wool wash.
2. Submerge the fur and press it down. Do not agitate — agitation felts it into a solid mat before you have made anything.
3. Soak twenty minutes, lift out, squeeze gently.
4. Rinse in water at the same temperature, twice.
5. Spread on a towel and dry completely. Damp fur stored away goes mouldy.

A second wash is worth it if the dog was oily. The finished piece should smell of nothing at all.

Preparing it

Wash first, then pick through it by hand and pull out guard hairs — tedious, and the single biggest quality difference in the finished piece.

Then card it. Hand carders open the fur, remove remaining debris, and let you blend wool in at the same time. The method is in carding wool by hand.

Blending with wool

Pure dog hair works with a good long undercoat, and it is slower and less predictable than wool. Blending gives you structure and speed:

• 70% dog / 30% wool — the fur still dominates and it behaves far better.
• 50/50 — reliable, and the recommended starting point.
• Wool core, dog hair surface — the practical trick for keepsakes. All the structure comes from cheap wool and the visible surface is entirely the dog.

Can you felt clipped, wiry or short dog hair?

Clipped hair can be felted if it is blended with wool; wiry and short smooth coats mostly cannot, and are better used in small amounts for colour. It depends on what the hair is, not only on how it was collected.

• Clippings from a groomer. Cut hair has blunt ends and is only as long as the coat was left, often well under the ¾ in (2 cm) where fur stops felting well on its own. Card it 50/50 with wool, or use it as the surface layer over a wool core. Clippings are also a mix of undercoat and guard hair, so sort and wash them as above.
• Poodle and doodle coats. Fine and curly, so they grip wool well once blended, even when clipped short. These are among the better clipped coats to work with.
• Wiry coats. Terriers and schnauzers that are hand-stripped shed mostly harsh outer hair, which behaves like guard hair and will not felt. Card a little into a wool blend for colour and accept that most of the structure is wool.
• Short smooth coats. Shed hairs from a boxer or greyhound are short, straight and stiff. A small amount blended into matching wool still puts the dog in the piece, but there is nothing here to felt by itself.

For any of these, match the wool to the coat colour before blending, so the finished piece still looks like the dog when the fur is only a share of it. The method for mixing shades is in blending wool colours.

Needle felting with it

Works well. Dog hair compacts more slowly than wool and stays slightly softer, so expect to work longer for the same firmness, and expect a slightly hazier surface — the fine fibres do not lie down as neatly.

The standard approach applies: build a core, add the fur as a surface layer, finish with a 40 gauge needle. See needle felting techniques.

Wet felting with it

Also works, and it needs more patience. Dog undercoat is slippery when wet and takes longer to grab. Use hotter water, more soap and a longer rubbing stage before rolling, and lay the fibre thicker than you would wool.

The general process is in wet felting for beginners.

What to make

• A small sculpture of the dog itself — the classic memorial piece, in the animal's own fur.
• A felted ball or bead — small, quick, and it uses very little fibre.
• An ornament with the fur as the surface layer over a wool core.
• A cushion insert or a small mat — blended with wool, for the households with a genuine surplus.

Because the quantity is usually limited, keepsakes are the right scale. A wool core with a dog-hair surface makes 30 g go three times as far.

How do you make a memorial keepsake from a small amount of dog hair?

Plan the project around the fur you have, and use wool for everything that does not show. When a dog has died the supply is fixed: often a brush, a bag of old clippings, or a clipping the vet saved. That decides the size of the piece.

Fur after preparing	What it makes
A pinch, under 1 g	Felted into the centre of a small wool heart or bead, or as one visible streak on its surface
About 2–5 g	The whole surface of a ball or heart 1–2 in (2.5–5 cm) across, over a wool core
About 10 g	The top coat of a small sitting dog about 3 in (7.5 cm) tall, over a wool core
30 g and up	An ornament in fur alone, or a larger figure with a wool core

Weigh the fur after washing, sorting and carding, not before. Picking out guard hair and carding both lose some of it, and the clean amount is what you actually have.

• Wash it in a fine sieve or a mesh bag. A small amount loose in a basin is easy to lose down the drain.
• Practise in wool first. Make the same shape once in ordinary wool so the fur is only used when you know the size and the steps.
• Keep some back. Leave a small tuft unworked in a paper envelope, in case you want to add to the piece later or make a second one.

A simple heart is the most forgiving memorial shape; felted hearts covers both needle and wet methods. For a likeness of the dog itself, needle felted pet portraits covers the head shape and markings, with the fur as the final coat.

Honest limitations

• It will smell if it gets wet, mildly, for the life of the piece — less so if it was washed properly, but wet dog is wet dog.
• Colour fades. Undercoat is often paler than the coat looks, and finished pieces come out lighter than people expect.
• Allergies. Working with a lot of fur releases dander. If anyone in the house reacts to dogs, do it outdoors.
• It is slower. Every stage takes longer than with wool. That is worth knowing before you start something ambitious.

The same questions come up with cats, with slightly different answers — see felting with cat hair.