How to Felt Without a Felting Needle

Felting needles are a nineteenth-century industrial invention. Felt itself is thousands of years older, and everything about it — hats, rugs, boots, tents — was made without a needle anywhere.

So if you have no needles, have broken all of them, or are working with children, there is nothing to work around. There is simply the other method.

The mechanism, either way

Wool fibres are covered in overlapping scales. Anything that makes them slide against each other in one direction and catch in the other will felt them.

• A barbed needle does it by dragging fibres past each other mechanically.
• Hot water, soap and friction do it by opening the scales with heat, letting them slide with soap, and rubbing them past each other with your hands.

Same result, different route. The details are in how felting needles work and wet felting for beginners.

Method 1: Hands, water and soap

The main technique, and the one to learn.

1. Lay wool out in two or three thin crossed layers, or wind it into a ball.
2. Wet it through with water as hot as your hands can bear.
3. Add soap — olive oil soap or ordinary washing-up liquid.
4. Rub gently at first, harder as the surface tightens.
5. Keep going until the fibres will not pull apart, then keep going some more.
6. Rinse in cool water and dry.

This makes flat sheets, balls, felted soap, scarves, and — with a resist — bags, bowls and hats. See resist felting.

Method 2: The washing machine

For knitted or woven wool, and for batches of balls.

Knitted pieces go in a laundry bag with a pair of jeans, a teaspoon of detergent, and a 60 °C wash. Balls go into the toe of a pair of tights, one per section with a knot between them, and run the same cycle.

Less control, no effort. Full method in felting in knitting.

Method 3: The jar

Wind a small ball of wool, put it in a jar with hot soapy water, screw the lid on and shake for a few minutes. The tumbling supplies the friction.

It is the classic children's method: no needles, no hot hands, and every child can do it at once. Results are slightly irregular, which nobody minds.

Method 4: Tumble drying

Damp wool in a tumble dryer felts through heat and tumbling alone. It is how wool dryer balls harden themselves in use, and it works as a finishing stage for a piece that is nearly there but not firm enough.

Unpredictable, so use it as a supplement rather than a plan.

Method 5: Improvised dry felting

If you specifically need dry sculptural work and have no needles: a stiff wire pet brush pressed repeatedly into wool will tangle it slowly, and a sharp darning needle will do something similar. Both are much slower than a proper felting needle, which has barbs and is the reason the tool exists.

This is a genuine last resort rather than a technique. If you like the dry method, buy needles — they cost very little, and the alternatives in felting mat alternatives mean the rest of the kit can be improvised.

Choosing between the routes

• Flat, hollow, worn, or large — wet felt. Scarves, bags, hats, bowls, rugs, slippers.
• Small, solid, detailed — needles. Animals, gnomes, mushrooms, faces.
• Both — extremely common. Wet felt the form, then needle the detail once it is dry.

What will not work regardless

Superwash wool, machine-washable merino, cotton, acrylic and any synthetic. No method felts a fibre that has no scales, and no amount of heat, soap or stabbing will change that. The symptoms are listed in why wool will not felt.