Wet Felting

This weekend I decided to try my hand at wet felting. My mom stopped by for a visit and I even let her {forced her} do some and it turned out rather nice! My poor mom is not where I get my craftiness from. She freely admits that she comes up with the ideas and lets someone else {me} figure out how to make them :) My mom happens to work with someone who has an alpaca farm {I am jealous!} and he gave me a good hunk of roving {fancy word for alpaca hair all nicely brushed out and fantastic} awhile back and I was too afraid to do anything with it. I looked up a few videos on YouTube on wet felting and they were super helpful to get me started...

SO I gathered my roving, some bubble wrap, a bowl of warm soapy water and a towel and got to it...

                                   This is what my roving looked like before I got started.

My mom {with a little assistance} pulled the roving into thin strips and laid it on the bubble wrap {look this up on YouTube, I couldn't get any sort of decent pictures of this step}, drizzled the warm soapy water over it and massaged it for a few minutes.

It looked like this when we opened it up. At this point I decided that we had worked it enough and went ahead and rinsed the soap off of it.

It sorta looked like matted up hair in a nice sheet. At this point I realized that I really should have used more roving so it would be thicker. Live and learn :)

We made a few, laid them on a baking rack and sat them outside to dry since it was a beautiful Southern California day. Can you tell which was our first attempt? They got thicker as we went along. I am going to make a brooch out of these later in the week. This would be a great craft to do with kids. I even found a few tutorials showing easy ways to do this with kids. Enjoy!