Friday, November 18, 2011

How to make felted wool coasters in 700 easy steps.


It's easy to make felted wool coasters following these simple steps.

First, find that awesome handwoven wool poncho that you made.  (I've tried to find a photo of it.  It's gone. Just trust me, it was amazing.  It was hanging in a tree with fall foliage fluttering around it.)


List the poncho online for $80.
Wait a year or so for it to sell.
Get impatient.
Unlist it.
Run it through the washer and dryer (hot water wash, then cold water rinse, then hot dryer) and voila! It becomes somewhat felted and fluffy.
Plop it on the floor to see how it looks.

Hmmm. It looks pretty nice, but it is fuzzy.  That won't feel good when exiting the shower with wet feet.

So take the $80 poncho rug and repeat that whole hot water wash, cold water rinse, trip through the hot dryer.  Ten times.

Now it's a lot smaller, a lot thicker, and you can cut it with scissors.

Use a ruler, cutting mat, pair of scissors, slide rule, calculator, home theater rear projection system, string cheese, broom handle, chicken wire, duct tape, styrofoam and a socket wrench to make perfectly even squares.  When they turn out less than perfectly even, keep trimming them until they are almost too small and you wasted all your effort.
Now cut out some letters from some other felted wool that you may or may not have felted deliberately and I do not want to talk about that, so just leave it alone, okay?

Sew those letters to your small-to-medium sized (but very thick!) coasters and you have:


Make several sets. List 'em in your Etsy shop. Wait, no, don't do that! This is MY idea! Mine, I tell you!

dj runnels
Life's an Expedition on Etsy.


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