Summer Holiday Crafts - day 3

Today we had another go at a craft we tried last summer - Wet Felting. Readers of my blog may remember the felt beads we made last year. This year through Pinterest I found  some super little felt turtles on the Yours 'til Niagra Falls blog, and as Lara is a fan of turtles I thought she would like to try making some.


We used some Merino Wool Rovings bought for just under a fiver on Ebay and some scraps of felt.

We took some of the wool and wound it into ball about 1.5" round. 


We then took a tiny bit of liquid soap and some hot water and started to roll the felt ball in our hands - like you would roll a ball of play dough.

We continued doing this, rinsing the ball and our hands under the hot water from time to time and gradually the ball became thicker and smaller.

 Once the balls were fairly hard we then started rinsing the balls in cold water too. This had the effect of shocking the wool and made it shrink even smaller until we had a small hard ball of felt.

The balls were then cut in half to make turtle shells and put on a tray outside in the sunshine to dry.

Once the shells had dried we cut bodies from felt scraps and glued the shells on top. We should have embroidered their eyes but instead decided to just mark them with a Promarker pen. 

Our 16 finished turtles. A few of the shells weren't perfect but they still look sweet.