I first learned about felt soap from kids I babysit who made it in an art class. I found they were adorable and would make incredibly unique gifts, so I knew I had to try to make them. I checked out a bunch of different tutorials on Google and Youtube and they had a variety of suggestions. I still don’t know if I’m doing it right, but I’ll tell you what steps worked for me!
Materials:
※Bar(s) of soap—I try to avoid odd shapes and sharp corners because I found they are harder to get an even felting. The bars of soap that are curved up like some Dove bars were harder to scrub the wool. The square bars with sharp corners sometimes turn out “bald” on the corners since the wool kind of moves around during the process and, again, the corners are a difficult shape/size to scrub.
※Wool roving—I could not find this at Michaels when I visited home but apparently they sell it at Joann’s fabric in San Jose. I have seen a bunch online—Etsy had a great variety, but watch out for the weight per unit! I also read you can buy it at yarn stores. I heard the better the quality, the easier it is to felt, and that Merino wool works the best. I don’t know how to tell the quality of wool roving though…
※Hot water/sink
※Towel
※Optional: sushi rolling mat, nylon stocking, felting needle & supplies (if you know how to needle felt!)
1. First pull off some pieces of wool roving and kind of stretch them out. I like to take a few colors and stretch them out together then place pieces on top of each other, stretch out again, place pieces on top, stretch out again, etc. until the colors are kind of blended together. This takes longer than using just one color but I think it looks cuter. The wool should be stretched out evenly into several strips.
→If you know how to needle felt, you can needle felt a design onto a chunk of wool that is the length of the entire perimeter of the bar of soap. This can be your top piece, but you will still need additional strips of wool.
→I tried to “card” the wool with carding brushes to blend the colors but it just made the wool into big clumps that weren’t even…I could not find any good tutorials on how to do this but would love to know! If you are lucky enough to find pre-swirled wool roving that would probably be easiest to work with!
2. Wrap the strips of wool around the felt. I think having pieces long enough to wrap around the entire bar are best. If the pieces are too short they sometimes clump and turn into knots when felting because they don’t get incorporated with the rest of the wool as easily. You need to wrap the strips in different directions so that the wool is kind of “woven” around the soap. I found that using too much wool makes it harder to felt, but not enough will leave you with bald spots.
→Some tutorials say to put the wool soap in a stocking at this point. By enclosing it in a tightly-wrapped stocking, you can prevent the wool from sliding around and ruining your design. I thought this does make a difference, but it is hard to see what your soap looks like and when I took it out of the stocking too soon to check my progress, the whole chunk of wool slid around like crazy and made it really hard to reshape. So try it with and without and see which was works best for you—remember the stocking needs to be tight around the soap!
3. Now the soap is ready to felt. I filled up a sink with hot water about 1/3 of the way. The tutorials say use warm water that is not hot enough to burn you but I do think that “hot” works better than “warm.” The hot water causes the wool to tighten and shrink (think about putting a wool sweater in the washing machine instead of dry cleaning it!) which is how the wool “felts.” Start by taking handfuls of hot water and dribbling it over the bar of soap in various areas, gently rubbing the wool in between splashes. The rubbing and hot water should cause the soap to sud, which will help bind the fibers of the wool together.
→If you pour large doses of water onto the soap too early, the wool will definitely shift and be hard to felt. Drizzle a little bit of water at a time!
4. Once the wool is nice and soapy, you can increase the doses of water and add more pressure. At this point, I like to also squeeze the soap like I am forming an onigiri (rice ball) to shape it. Sometimes the wool will slide around, but you can adjust it with your hands and squeeze it into place. You basically continue shaping and squeezing the wool until it “shrinks” and looks the way you want it to. Sometimes it takes a good ten to fifteen minutes for one bar…
5. After your wool is felted, dry it off with a towel and then place it on the towel to dry. It should feel soft and wooly once dry. When using them, it helps to use hot water to allow the wool to shrink with the soap.
Here are some other websites I liked:
Finished projects:
