Wool Roving Crafts: Fourteen Things to Make with Loose Wool

Roving is unspun, cleaned, carded wool sold in long soft ropes. Most people who buy it are felting, and most people who felt end up with a drawer of leftovers. Both groups are missing what else it does.

The basics of buying and handling it are in wool roving for felting. This is the list of what to do with it.

No equipment at all

1. Arm-knitted blanket

Chunky roving knitted on your forearms into a giant-gauge throw. Fast and spectacular, and honest about its drawbacks: unspun wool sheds, pills and pulls apart under tension, so a blanket like this is decorative rather than hard-wearing.

Use 1 kg or more of chunky roving for a lap throw, 2 to 3 kg for anything bed-sized. Cast on over one forearm, knit the whole row onto the other arm, and keep the loops far looser than instinct says — tight loops on an arm-knitted piece cannot be evened out afterwards. Two hours for a throw, and the wool costs more than everything else on this list put together.

If you want it to survive being used rather than photographed, felt the surface lightly afterwards: lay it flat, mist it with warm soapy water, and press rather than rub. It stiffens the fabric and roughly halves the shedding.

2. Wreath wrap

Wind roving around a straw or wire wreath base, overlapping as you go, and pin the end. Add dried flowers, felt balls or a ribbon. Twenty minutes, and it looks like considerably more.

3. Cloud and nature garlands

Tufts of white roving threaded onto cord make a cloud garland for a nursery; earthy shades make an autumn one. Nothing needs to be felted at all.

4. Stuffing

Wool roving stuffs cushions, toys and dolls, and gives a firmer, heavier, warmer result than polyester. Tease it into loose handfuls first — pushing a rope in whole gives lumps.

With a felting needle

5. Felt balls and beads

The classic use for offcuts: 3 g each and they become garlands, necklaces, cat toys and rugs. See how to make felt balls and how to make felt beads.

6. Doll hair

Roving is the most convincing doll hair available — it can be plaited, brushed, trimmed and styled. Lay it over the head, needle a parting, trim to length. Full method in how to make felt dolls.

7. Mending and embellishment

Wool needled over a hole in a jumper, or a motif needled onto a denim jacket. See needle felting on fabric.

8. Small sculpture

Mushrooms, pumpkins, gnomes, animals. The whole of needle felting ideas for beginners runs on offcuts.

With water and soap

9. Felted soap

10 g of roving around a bar of soap. Quickest useful thing you can make from loose wool — see felted soap benefits.

10. Wool dryer balls

60 g each of cheap undyed roving, wound tight and run through a hot wash. Six of them replace fabric softener for years: wool dryer balls.

11. Nuno felting onto silk

Thin veils of roving migrated through silk chiffon make scarves that weigh almost nothing — nuno felting for beginners.

With simple tools

12. Weaving

Unspun roving woven as weft on a frame loom gives a thick, soft, cloud-like texture that no yarn matches. It is the standard trick behind almost every woven wall hanging with a fluffy band across it, and it needs nothing but a cardboard loom and a fork to try.

Two things make the difference. Draft the roving down to a consistent thickness before you weave it, or the band bulges where the rope was fat. And beat it down gently — roving compresses far more than yarn, so the same force that packs a woollen weft flattens this one into nothing.

Roving weft will not take tension, so keep it to horizontal bands between rows of real yarn rather than weaving a whole piece in it.

13. Punch needle and rug hooking

Roving can be punched or hooked into hessian in place of yarn for a plush, high-pile surface. It sheds more than yarn, so it suits wall pieces better than floor rugs.

14. Spinning

The original purpose, and the most useful skill on this list if you also knit. A drop spindle costs very little, and it turns a bag of fibre into yarn you can actually build something out of — which is what makes a kilo of roving go furthest.

Combed top is much easier to learn on than carded roving, because it drafts evenly and does not surprise you with a thick patch. Start with about 50 g of a medium wool: fine merino is slippery and coarse fibre is scratchy on the hands, and neither is a kind first fibre.

The learning curve is real and short. Expect the first 50 g to be unusable, the second to be lumpy but knittable, and the third to be yarn.

What each one takes

Roughly, and per finished item. "Must felt" means superwash will not work.

Project	Wool	Time	Must felt
Arm-knitted blanket	1 kg+	1–2 h	No
Wreath wrap	50 g	20 min	No
Garland	20 g	30 min	No
Stuffing	by volume	—	No
Felt ball, 3 cm	3 g	10 min	Yes
Doll hair	10–20 g	30 min	No
Mending a hole	2–5 g	15 min	Yes
Small sculpture	10–30 g	1–2 h	Yes
Felted soap	10 g	20 min	Yes
Dryer ball	60 g	30 min + a hot wash	Yes
Nuno scarf	30–50 g	3 h	Yes
Woven wall hanging	100 g+	2–3 h	No
Punch needle panel	50 g+	2 h	No
Spinning	any	—	No

The cheapest way in is the wreath or a garland: fifty grams of wool, no tools, and nothing that can go permanently wrong. The best return on effort is dryer balls, which cost about a pound each to make and replace fabric softener for years.

Which fibre for which job

The projects that do not felt are the ones where the fibre choice opens up. Anything decorative can use whatever looks right, including superwash, silk blends and the novelty fibres that are useless for felting.

• Bulk and volume — cheap carded wool by the kilo. Blankets, stuffing, weaving, wreaths. Nobody is judging the breed.
• Anything with visible colour — dyed tops, because they draft evenly and the colour is consistent along the length.
• Doll hair — long-stapled lustre wool, or curly locks for ringlets. Superwash is genuinely better here: it will not mat as the doll is played with.
• Nuno — fine merino top only. Coarse fibre will not migrate through silk.
• Spinning — whatever you like, but combed top is far easier to learn on than carded roving.

Which is which, and what each costs, is in roving vs top vs batting.

Two things to know before you start

• Superwash roving is fine for most of this. It cannot felt, which rules it out of six of the fourteen above — felt balls and beads, mending, sculpture, felted soap, dryer balls and nuno — and is an advantage in the other eight, because it will not mat while you handle it.
• Unspun wool sheds. Anything made from raw roving without felting will leave fibre on clothes and furniture. Plan accordingly, and felt the surface lightly if it matters.

Buying for a first attempt

Almost everything here runs on the same two purchases, and neither is expensive.

• A kilo of undyed carded wool, the cheapest thing on the shelf by weight. This covers stuffing, dryer balls, cores, weaving, wreaths and anything where colour does not matter — which is most of the list by weight.
• 100 g each of three or four dyed colours, a few times the price of core wool by weight but bought in far smaller amounts. Enough for every decorative project here several times over, because the visible work uses grams rather than hundreds of grams.

Buy the cheap wool first and in quantity. The commonest mistake is a drawer of beautiful 10 g colour samples and nothing to build anything out of. What separates the grades, and what each is actually for, is in wool roving for needle felting.

The leftover drawer

Small amounts of many colours are the hardest thing to use up and the easiest to combine. Card them together into a single heathered blend and you have a perfectly good core wool that costs nothing — see carding wool by hand.