So I am a pretty clever crafter. I can usually figure things out even if I don’t have a step-by-step tutorial, and often even when I do have a tutorial I forget to check the details and end up making things up as I go. But after seven (I am nothing if not stubborn) attempts to follow the tutorial for making a wet-felted basket with crochet embellishments on a rubber ball resist, as illustrated in Natasha Smart’s book Wet Felting, I had to throw in the towel. Two towels, actually, both of them soaked. Not only could I not get the project finished, I couldn’t even get it properly started.
It has taken a lot of work to assemble the pieces for this adventure and I did not give in lightly. I waited about four months in the queue at the library for her book. I agonized over whether to drop the $67 to order the pair of wet felting balls she recommends ($10 and $12 each, but with $32 shipping plus an unfavourable conversion rate from US dollars) but found a $20 amazon.ca substitute. I had to google how to crochet magic rings and double crochets, because apparently even if you have made two shawls and an entire hooded cardigan in the last couple of years, when you put new craft ideas into one side of your brain the stuff you learned previously falls out the other side of your brain. And I spent two or three contented hours crocheting my flower embellishments after searching ravelry for probably twice that long on various circular crochet patterns. (I won’t include the time I spent agonizing over the fibre colours because that’s just baked into every project.)

So it took me a while to get to the point when I could actually start felting, but I was pretty excited to get going. And it’s not like I’m new to wet felting — not exactly an old hand, but I’ve worked with resists a few times, even making fitted felt slippers last month. I get felting, in theory at least.
The idea was to make a little basket out of felt, about the size to hold an in-progress craft project, in fact. And you lay out the felt around a ball to get the 3D bowl shape. All well within my skillset, I thought.
While I had one false start with the embellishments on the wrong side of the fibre the first time I started laying it out (as seen in the photo below), I caught it in time and was pretty pleased with myself for laying out a little frame to work in and logicking out the relative placement of everything. Carefully avoiding the top section where the opening would be, I laid out half of my green fibre for the bowl exterior in one layer of fibre horizontally, ensuring my embellishments were near the midline and adding a darker green in the bottom third for an ombre effect.

And that’s when things started to go awry.
I rolled the dry fibre around the ball with the embellishments on the inside and sprayed it with hot soapy water. I tried to use the papier-mâché technique in the book, laying wet shingles of fibre perpendicular to the layer that kept trying to escape from the presence of the ball, but the fibre wanted to stick to my hands. I soaped up my hands and tried to add more water, and the embellishments fell through the fibre. No matter which way I turned the ball, whatever side was on the bottom dropped off.



Maybe I need more water? So I added more hot soapy water. Nope. Maybe I need less water? So I tried to glue things together with drier fibre. Nope. Okay, unroll everything and start again (middle image) with lots of water this time. Roll it in water in the bowl and put more water on top.
Nope.
Okay, maybe the embellishments are too heavy. They’re not as big as the ones she has in the book, but who knows. Peel everything back, pluck out the crochet flowers and maybe I can add them in at the pre-felt stage, or needle felt them in. I just need to get this fibre to adhere to itself and start felting.


Nope!
You can see that the fibre is actually starting to felt a bit, but after five or six attempts I could not even get it to stick to itself around the ball enough to start adding the next layers. More water, less water, hotter water, more soap. One thing I was happy about was that each time I restarted I remembered to keep the plug for deflating the ball in the right spot – not that I ever got that far. After about 90 minutes of not even being able to get the first layer to behave, let alone move to the next layer, I decided to call this one a fail.
I still like the idea of the felted basket with the crochet wool embellished flowers, but I think I will try again on a nice flat circular resist. Looking again at the book, I wonder if I shouldn’t have been using chunkier shingles of fibre. Maybe I’ll try again on the ball one day without the embellishments, with a fresh set of colours.

In the meanwhile, nothing was lost except time and several litres of water. I spread the fibre and the flowers out to dry and made a nice cup of tea. It’s not really a fail if you learned a few things along the way, right?