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, spectacular, and honest about its drawbacks: unspun wool sheds and pills, and a blanket like this is decorative rather than hard-wearing. Use 1 kg or more of chunky roving.

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 can match. It is the standard trick in woven wall hangings, and it needs nothing but a cardboard loom to try.

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. A drop spindle costs very little and turns roving into real yarn — the most useful skill on this list if you also knit, and the one that makes a kilo of fibre go furthest.

Two things to know before you start

• Superwash roving is fine for most of this. It cannot felt, which is a disadvantage in exactly four of the projects above and an advantage in the rest — 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.

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.