Skill Guide: Felting, and Fulling and Differential Shrinkage

If you’ve ever shrunk a wool garment in the wash—congratulations! You’ve fulled fabric! While accidental fulling, as in the case of a now-too-small beloved sweater, can be devastating, fulling on purpose can be great fun and expands the types of cloth you can create (and what you can do with it!)

There is a distinction in the textile world between fulling and felting. That is, strictly speaking, felting is a process you do with fibers, not with woven cloth.

Fulling stabilizes wool fibers creating a solid out of what was once separate threads of yarn. Once a fabric is thoroughly fulled, you can cut it and it won't ravel at the cut edges. You can also combine yarns that full, like wool, with yarns that don’t, like cotton, to give your fabric ripples and bumps through a technique called differential shrinkage. Want to learn more? Then read on with this skill guide devoted to fulling.

Contents include:

• Fulling vs. felting
• How to full fabric
• Differential shrinkage
• Can you predict fulling?
• Patterns to try

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