How to Make Felt Balls by Hand — Including Thirty at a Time

Felt balls are the raw material for garlands, rugs, mobiles, necklaces and a lot of children's play. You can needle felt them one at a time, and for a single firm ball that is the right method — but when you need thirty, wet felting is the answer. It produces them in batches, in minutes each, with nothing but hot water and soap.

Which method to use

• Wet felting — fast, batchable, slightly softer, perfectly round with practice. Right for garlands, rugs and quantity.
• Needle felting — slower, denser, more controllable. Right when the ball is a component of a sculpture, or needs to be very firm. Method in the needle felted ball tutorial.

What you need

• Wool tops in your chosen colours. Roughly 3–4 g per 3 cm ball
• Hot water, as hot as your hands can stand
• Olive oil soap or plain bar soap
• A bowl, and a towel
• Optional: rubber gloves with a textured palm, which speed things up considerably

Any feltable wool works, since nobody sees the inside — though the outer colour should be something you like. Coarser wool felts faster; see choosing felting wool.

Sizing: start much bigger

Wool balls lose about half their diameter. For a finished ball of 3 cm, start with a loose ball of roughly 6 cm — it will look absurdly large and be correct.

Weigh the wool for the first few if you want consistency across a set. Eyeballing produces a pleasant variety; weighing produces a matched garland. Both are legitimate.

How much wool do you need for each size of felt ball?

Wool needed rises with the volume of the ball, not its width, so doubling the diameter takes roughly eight times the wool. Starting from the 3–4 g that makes a 1¼ in (3 cm) ball, the other common sizes work out like this:

Finished ball	Wind it to	Wool	Typical use
¾ in (2 cm)	1½ in (4 cm)	about 1 g	Necklaces, small garlands
1 in (2.5 cm)	2 in (5 cm)	about 2 g	Garlands, trivets
1¼ in (3 cm)	2½ in (6 cm)	3–4 g	Garlands, mobiles
1½ in (4 cm)	3 in (8 cm)	7–9 g (about ¼ oz)	Cat toys, ornaments
2 in (5 cm)	4 in (10 cm)	14–18 g (about ½ oz)	Baubles, juggling balls

The figures assume the ball is felted properly hard. Stop early and the same wool makes a slightly larger, softer ball; that is the problem the next sections are about. Above 2 in a solid ball takes a long time to felt through to the middle, which is why big felted balls are usually built over a core of cheap wool or a polystyrene ball, as in felted Christmas balls.

Step 1: Wind the wool

Pull a length off the top and wind it into a ball, changing direction every few turns so the fibres cross. Tuck the end in.

Do not simply scrunch it. A crumpled wad has dense and hollow regions and will felt into an oval with a soft middle.

Step 2: Wet it briefly

Dip the ball in hot soapy water and squeeze gently to push water through the middle, then squeeze most of it back out. Soaking wet wool slides instead of gripping.

Step 3: Roll with almost no pressure

Cup the ball loosely between your palms and roll it in a circular motion using barely any pressure at all. For the first two or three minutes the ball is fragile — press now and you will get creases and folds that never come out.

This gentle opening stage is the single thing that separates round balls from lumpy ones.

Step 4: Increase pressure gradually

As the surface tightens, roll more firmly. Keep changing the axis of rotation so you are not always rolling the same equator.

Dip back into hot water whenever it cools. Alternating with a dip in cold water speeds the process — the temperature shock makes the fibres contract.

Step 5: Roll until hard

Five to ten minutes per ball. A finished felt ball is genuinely hard — it should not dent under thumb pressure and should bounce slightly if dropped on a table. Most people stop at the point where it merely holds together, and those balls go soft and misshapen within months.

Step 6: Rinse and dry

Rinse in cool water until the soap is gone, squeeze firmly, and leave to dry somewhere warm. Balls take a day or two to dry through — they hold water in the centre long after the surface feels dry.

How do you tell when a wet felted ball is done?

A wet felted ball is done when it passes three quick tests while still wet: it does not dent under your thumb, the surface will not pinch up, and it bounces. Run them in that order, because each one catches a ball the previous one lets through.

1. The thumb test. Press hard with the pad of your thumb. A finished ball pushes back and leaves no dent. If it gives like a sponge, keep rolling.
2. The pinch test. Try to pinch up the surface between finger and thumb. On a finished ball there is nothing to grab. If a loose skin lifts away, or seems to slide over the inside, the outside has felted but the middle has not, and the ball needs more firm rolling and more hot and cold dips to drive the felting inwards.
3. The bounce test. Drop it onto a hard table from about a foot (30 cm). A hard ball bounces back with a dull knock; a soft one lands with a thud and stays put.

Size is the fourth check. A ball that has reached roughly half its wound diameter has shrunk about as far as it will, and the figures in the table above will be close.

When you are starting a big batch, cut one finished ball in half with a sharp craft knife once it is dry. The cut face should be the same density from edge to centre. A ring of hard felt around a loose fluffy middle means you pressed hard too early, sealing the surface before water and movement reached the core. On the next ball, roll longer at light pressure and squeeze the hot water right through it each time you dip.

Making thirty at once

Batch production changes the maths entirely.

1. Wind all the cores first. An hour of winding gives you thirty ready to felt.
2. Work in rotation. Roll one for thirty seconds through the fragile stage, set it aside, start the next. By the time you return to the first, it has firmed slightly and can take more pressure.
3. Once past the delicate stage, roll two at a time, one in each palm against the table.
4. Rinse and dry as a batch.

A garland's worth is an afternoon rather than a week.

The washing machine method

Wind the balls, tie each into the toe of an old pair of tights with a knot between them, and run a hot wash with a little detergent and something abrasive like a towel. They come out felted.

The results are less round and less controllable than hand-rolled, but for a rug or a large garland where irregularity does not matter, it is a genuinely reasonable shortcut.

Two-colour and marbled balls

• Solid core, coloured surface: wind a cheap core, then wrap a thin veil of your colour around it before wetting. Uses far less of the expensive fibre.
• Marbled: lay two colours together as you wind. They blur into each other as the ball felts.
• Spotted: press small tufts of a contrast colour onto the surface before the first wetting and they will felt in place.

What to make

Threaded on cord with a long needle, felt balls become garlands and necklaces. Stitched side by side, they become trivets and rugs. Felted extra hard, they become cat toys. Small ones in graded colours make a mobile that costs almost nothing.

For seasonal versions, see felted Christmas ornaments.

Wrapped round a pebble instead of a wool core, the same rolling makes felted stones, with the weight of the stone inside. Felted a little less firmly, so pins still go in, a 2 in ball makes a wool pincushion.