Wet felting fall leaves is a fun and adventurous process!
You can mix colors in many different hues and create something
vibrant and life-like. This little tutorial should get you started!

Start with wool that will wet felt well in your chosen colors. I like a mixture of oranges, browns, greens and yellows. Shown here is our fall-pack 2, but you can also pick and choose more colors from our merino-cross felting batts.		A lid from a plastic storage bin is great to layout your wool, this makes it easy to flip over and transport before wet felting. Starting size was approx. 12" x 13". We created two layers by mixing up the colors, for a total weight of 1oz.
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Prepare your surface in layers: towel, bubble wrap, mesh, wool, mesh. Use hot water and an olive oil soap solution to fully wet the wool from the center out. The sponge helps press water though, and air out.		Use your hands to press, press, press. Gentle but firm pressure is used to ensure the wool is wet all the way through. The mesh on both sides of the fiber serves as a nice barrier to prevent wool from sticking to your hands and bubble wrap.
Once the wool is fully wetted, use a wooden dowel or pvc pipe as a core to roll up your package. Roll your package firmly, making sure not to wrinkle the fibers.Cut up fabric, and especially t-shirt material makes great ties for your roll.		Roll the package 50 times from finger-tips to elbows. Then untie and roll from the opposite end, rolling another 50 times. The wool shrinks in the direction it is rolled, so repeat this from all 4 edges, flip over and repeat from all 4 edges again. Adding a small amount of hot, soapy water to your fiber with each new roll may help speed the felting.
Check your felt. A "pinch test" will reveal if your felt is in the soft stage. The piece should slightly "tent" from the pinch, with the fibers holding together and not pulling apart from each other. If the fibers just separate, continue rolling as in the previous stage another 25-30 times from each side.		Once the fibers are holding together, roll your felt over your dowel again from all 8 sides. You can leave your bubble wrap down and use that as your rolling surface. You can continue to "full" your piece by rubbing with your hands, giving it hot and cold rinses, and adding soap and water and rubbing it on your bubble wrap. Get it as smooth and well felted as desired.
Here is our felt, a nice, thin piece, well felted and perfect for cutting! Time to rinse, SQUEEZE out the water (do not wring) and set it to dry so that it is flat. Final size was 10x11 = 2" shrinkage.		Click the image above for a template of leaves, find more on the internet or create your own free-hand! We simply cut out the desired shapes, layed them on our felt, and used tiny scissors to cut them out.
You can display your leaves after they are cut, or create a more natural look by wet felting them individually. Just wet them again with hot water and soap, and felt by rubbing them between your hands.		We also added some purple stitching for interest! One ounce yielded 5 larger maple leaves in the 3"- 4" range, and about 10 leaves in the 2"-3" range. Have fun and send us picture of your felted autumn leaves!