Making felt the Mongolian way (sort of)

This week daughter Lena was doing a report on Mongolia and being the fiber oriented household that we are she chose how they make felt. Honestly, I did not influence her a bit. Well, maybe I did, but, it was just a little bit. Aside from the written report she wrote on the making of felt in Mongolia and it's uses, she and I decided to make felt the Mongolian way. She showed me this video that she found on felt making and we were off.










Since we had both made felt before we had a general idea how it was done and just tried to scale down the Mongolian process to fit in our kitchen. Using sheep's wool stuffing that was not carded, she arranged a thick rectangular bat of it the same size at the produce bag we would be using to roll up the wool in.

We cut open the produce bag and lay the bat on one half of it. We then sprinkled it with surprisingly little water and folded the plastic bag over the top. At this point the layer of wool will be in between the two layer of plastic.

She then rolled the whole thing up around a rolling pin (a heavy dowel would work too.)

She then rolled the whole thing up in a dish towel like this and we used masking tape to hold it closed. Rubber bands would have been a better choice in hind sight because as the masking tape got wet it started to come off.


Then she rolled until past the point that it was fun .

Here is the finished result. We really did make felt.