Green Options

After you’ve followed my felted wool tutorial, you will find yourself left with–what else? Felted wool!

What to do, what to do?

The best thing is that there are loads of cool projects designed for felted wool, and its versatility means that there are just as many projects for beginners as there are for the most advanced crafters.

What to do with felted wool?

Well, here are five things to start with:

Wherever you might normally stand on the felt controversy, I think that we can all get behind the claim that felted wool?

Is awesome.

Felted wool has all the benefits of wool for crafting–it’s sturdy, can be shaped, holds a dimensional structure well, is durable, and has an appealing texture–and has the eco-friendly attributes of being natural and second-hand. As part of my green crafting manifesto, I do not buy new things, nor do I intentionally buy products exploitative of the world’s creatures (please, don’t ask me about glue!), and yet when I buy a wool sweater from the Goodwill Outlet Store, I don’t have to worry about whether or not the wool has an organic certification, or about the high price of organic wool. I just think, “Yay, recycling!”

And yet, the wool sweater you take home from the thrift store requires some work before it becomes that versatile wool felt. Here’s exactly the work you need to do:

Every Christmas Eve with my mom (you know about my mom, right?), she drags out these utterly godawful stockings for her grandbabies to use–quilted cotton with a printed image of teddy bears in bathrobes and slippers, bought sometime during the Reagan administration. From Wal-mart. On sale. Ugh. But how could I complain? I, who am obviously too cheap to pony up for non-teddy bear stockings for my own kids?

All that will change this year. With four tacky wool sweaters and an easy-peasy stocking pattern, I sewed up a houseful of awesome, unique, sturdy and sophisticated stockings for the girls to…um, yeah, my mom? She always tells them to just set their stockings by the front door. So Santa can see them as soon as he walks in, you know?

Sigh. Come follow along with me, anyway, and make some stockings of your own.