Felting workshop: day 4

On the final day we made hats. Again I left my camera at home and arrived 2 and a half hours too late... (morning traffic + frantic children). So again I only have pictures of the final product at home.

I had 2 grand ideas, one that Karmit dismissed immediately with a big lough (a 3D cloud hat with a rainbow and a big sun at the back) and one that I actually tried but abandoned: it was a rectangular hat with on the top a sun on one side and a moon on the other. the moon was going to be half black and half white, as if it's being lit by the sun, and I was going to draw trees and houses on the hat itself with pre-felted pieces. but making a half black-half white ball for a moon wasn't working at all, and after 2 different tries I turned to the final, simpler idea of a rabbit's ears hat.

I made a plastic template in the shape of the hats profile (only larger), and another template for the ears. first I laid the wool for the ears and sort of half felted them, except at their base, where they were to connect to the hat. I laid some white wool along the inside of the ears that remained unfelted, to imitate the furry bits of the ears. 

 

then I took the template out of them and placed them on the hat's template, opening and flattening the wool of the ear's bases. and then I covered the ear's bases and the rest of the template with wool and felted the whole thing. I used a plastic sheet to separate the ears from the rest of the hat, so they don't accidentally get felted together.

Finally I cut open the part of the hat's opening, took the template out and worked the middle line, where the template's edge used to be, until it looked seamless. then the fulling stage, to give it a good shape and shrink it to the right size. I stopped fulling when I could wear it and I kept it on my head all the way home, but couldn't resist shrinking it further to fit my children.