How I feel about felting...

Don't you love it when you try something you've been putting off - maybe it seemed difficult, or you didn't think you had the proper tools for it - and it turns out, once you give it a try, it's really easy and you didn't need anything special to do it after all?

Such was my experience last week.  

I needed a quick and easy project for a CAL I'm hosting this week on Ravelry and I came across a pattern for making felted coasters and a felted container to hold the coasters in.  The instructions looked too easy not to try - even though I didn't really think it could be as easy as the designer made it look.  I figured even it was a bust, it was worth a couple of hours of my time to finally try this felting thing.

Well, lo and behold, felting a crocheted (or knitted) coaster and bowl is extremely easy!   You need to use 100% non-superwash wool and you'll need a few items everyone has at home, and you're good to go.  My coasters are still "in process", but my bowl is finished:

 I'll be the first to say it's not the prettiest thing, but I'm still very excited to have a success. 

If you check out the pattern link and think you'd like to crochet a set of coasters and a container to put in them, I have some thoughts to share:

First of all, I had to make my coasters and the base of the bowl larger than the designer said to (maybe because I crocheted too tightly?)   Shrug.  For the coasters I crocheted 10 rounds to get a 5-inch coaster (pre-felting).  After felting (and drying) my first coaster measures 4 1/5 inches across - which is a perfect size.   I made the base of my bowl two rounds larger than my pre-felted coasters, but that ended up being a bit too small to hold my coasters.

So, I think this is important to mention...  If you want to make a container to fit coasters into, I suggest making coasters first (felted and dried) and then make the container's bottom at least an inch and a half larger than the felted coaster, then crochet the sides.  Once felted, this should give you enough space inside the container to fit the coasters.  That said, it's all still a bit of a guessing game.

If you're curious about my experience and things I did differently from the designer of this pattern, I've written a detailed explanation of how I felted the bowl above on the CAL page on Ravelry.  

Here's the thing... felting is an inexact science (or maybe it's more of an art - but regardless, it's inexact).  Everything shrinks during felting and I'm thinking it's pretty near impossible to accurately determine how much shrinkage you'll have.  After I have some more experience under my belt, I may feel like what I have to share about this business is worth writing about in more detail, but for now I'm embracing the uncertainty and enjoying turning something like this:

into this:

Just because I can.  

To see what other Yoppers are up to, visit our group on Ravelry.