Needle Felting on Fabric: Base Fabrics That Actually Work

Needle felting onto fabric is the fastest route to decorated clothes, patched jeans, appliqué pictures and covering a hole in a jumper. Whether it works depends almost entirely on what is underneath.

How it holds

Two mechanisms. On a wool base, the needled fibres tangle with the base's own fibres and the scales lock — a genuine bond, effectively permanent. On a non-wool base, the fibres are pushed through the weave and hook around the threads, held mechanically only.

That difference explains everything else on this page.

Base fabrics, best to worst

Excellent

• Wool felt. The ideal background — dense, no grain, no fraying, holds fibre completely. See wool felt fabric.
• Prefelt. Same, thinner and softer. Good for pieces that need to drape.
• Boiled wool and felted knitwear. Takes needled wool as if it were designed for it.
• Loosely knitted wool. Jumpers, blankets, scarves. The open structure lets fibre through easily.

Workable

• Wool suiting and tweed. Woven and dense, so use a fine needle and be patient.
• Denim. Surprisingly good — thick, loose enough to take fibre, and forgiving. The standard choice for visible mending.
• Calico, linen, canvas. Open weaves that hold fibre mechanically. Work from both sides.
• Silk and chiffon. Only in nuno felting, where wet felting does the actual work. Needling alone will shred them.

Poor or hopeless

• Tightly woven synthetics — the needle cannot get fibre through.
• Polar fleece — the pile hides the wool and nothing anchors.
• Jersey and stretch knits — they distort as you work and the design puckers permanently.
• Leather, oilcloth, coated fabric — the needle either will not pass or leaves permanent holes.
• Acrylic craft felt — the most common disappointment. It looks right and holds nothing.

Method

1. Support the fabric on a brush mat or dense foam. A brush mat is better here — it holds the cloth flat without compressing it. Other options in felting mat alternatives.
2. Pin the fabric taut but not stretched. Fabric felted while stretched puckers when released.
3. Lay the design. Loose wisps for soft shapes, cut prefelt for crisp edges.
4. Tack first. A few stabs at the centre of each element to stop it moving.
5. Work with a 40 gauge needle, shallow and frequent rather than deep. You are hooking fibre through the weave, not compacting a mass.
6. Turn it over. A few passes from the back pull fibre through and roughly double how well it holds.
7. Check the front for holes. On woven fabric, coarse needles leave a line of dots that will not close.

Making it survive washing

On wool, needled designs are durable enough for normal careful wear. On cotton and denim they need help:

• A short wet felting stage. Warm soapy water and gentle rubbing over the design tightens the wool into itself and grips the base far more firmly.
• Stitching. A running stitch or a few tacking stitches around each shape. Visible mending traditions do this openly and it looks right.
• Fusible interfacing on the back for anything that will not be washed much.

Hand wash cool, and never tumble dry. Agitation is exactly what pulls needled fibre back out.

Mending with it

A hole in a wool jumper is the ideal case. Put a scrap of wool felt behind the hole, lay wool over the front, needle through both from each side, and it becomes a patch that is part of the garment. Contrasting colour reads as deliberate; matching colour rarely quite matches and reads as a repair.

On finished garments

Work with something between the layers — a piece of foam or a rolled towel inside a sleeve — or you will felt the front of a jumper to its back. It happens to everybody once.

Knitted sweaters

A wool sweater is one of the best bases there is, and also the easiest to spoil, because knit moves. The design should go into the knit as it sits when worn, neither stretched nor bunched.

1. Lay it flat and leave it relaxed. Slide a brush mat or a block of foam inside, under the area you are working, and smooth the knit over it without pulling. If you stretch it over the mat or into a hoop, the design will pucker the moment you take it off.
2. Mark the design with tailor's chalk or a water-soluble pen. On a busy knit, needle a paper template on for the first few stabs, then tear it away.
3. Use thin layers. A sweater needs far less wool than a felt background. Too much makes a stiff patch that no longer moves with the knit.
4. Work shallow with a 40 gauge needle. Go only through the front layer, at right angles to the knit, so the needle passes between the yarn strands rather than splitting them.
5. Finish from the inside. A few light passes from the back lock the design in. Then check the inside. The stray fibres there will rub against the skin, so needle them flat.

Keep designs away from ribbing, cuffs and the neckline. Those are the parts that stretch most every time the sweater goes on, and a felted patch there either cracks or pulls the ribbing out of shape.

Letters and clean edges

Lettering is where needle felting on a sweater looks homemade or looks finished, and the difference is almost entirely the edge.

• Outline first, then fill. Twist a thin strand of wool between your fingers into a loose yarn and needle it along the outline of each letter. Fill inside the outline afterwards. The outline holds the edge while you work the middle.
• Or use wool yarn for the whole letter. For simple script, a single strand of feltable wool yarn needled along the chalk line gives the crispest result of all, with an even width throughout.
• Cut shapes from prefelt. For block capitals, cut each letter from a sheet of prefelt with sharp scissors and needle it down. The edge is already clean before you start.
• Use a cookie cutter for bold shapes. A metal cutter pressed onto the knit holds the wool in a hard edge while you needle inside it. The method is in cookie cutter needle felting.
• Tidy edges at an angle. Wisps that escape the line can be tucked back with shallow stabs angled in towards the letter, rather than straight down.
• Size it up. Letters under about 2.5 cm (1 in) tall lose their shape in a chunky knit, because the stitches are nearly as big as the strokes.

What the sweater is made of

On an untreated wool sweater the design bonds into the knit and survives careful hand washing for years. On a superwash sweater the scales on the base fibres have been removed or coated, so the design holds only by tangling. It looks the same at first and lifts sooner. Cotton and acrylic sweaters behave like cotton fabric above: the wool holds mechanically, so back it with stitching. Either way, wash the sweater inside out, by hand in cool water, and dry it flat.