Wool padding

The theme for one of the HSM challenges is:

"It’s Only Natural: Make something inspired by nature, or use natural fibres and materials in a way that stretches your usual practice (e.g. natural dyeing, using cane instead of plastic whalebone for corsets/stays etc.)"

 At first I had no idea what I was going to do, but since I'm going to make a new wulsthaube for my 1520s gown I decided to go all natural on it, unlike my old one that had synthetic padding. Cotton padding could have been used in the 16th century in Germany, but up here in Sweden any padding would have had to be wool.

Now one of my co-workers have a small flock of sheep, and I asked if she could give me some wool from them.

She came with a bag of raw wool rowings. They only use the wool as cover in the gardens so it was dirty and filled with small sticks and other stuff that had gotten caught in the fleece.

The first step was to simply by hand sorting the rowings and removing the dirt that I could pick by hand. After that I let the wool soak in several baths of cold water. The water in the first bath turned brown, so I changed water more or less directly. For the other baths I let the wool lie there for several hours, the last bath was overnight. By now the water coming off the wool was clear.

The best thing would have been to hang the wool out to dry in the garden, but I had to make do with my bathroom. I placed the mass of wool on a rack, so the air could circulate undet it as well. Then I just let it sit in my bathrrom until it was totally dry, which took a couple of days.

Then it was time for the fun part - felting the wool. I haven't felted wool since I did a thing with a kindergarten group and we made balls. Also I don't own a set to card the wool, but I had read a couple of descriptions where people felted uncarded wool.

Felting wool is wet and sloppy, I did it in my apartment building's communal washing area. Basically I placed the wool rowings on a board, stacked several on top of each other and then I drenched it in water mixed with green soft soap (grönsåpa) and while it was wet I rubbed the fibers against each other. As soone as they started to dry up I added more soap-water. It took me around 30 minutes to get a felted mat. It has holes in it and is uneven, but since I'm just going to use it for padding, that's ok. It would not hold up for any heavy wear.

When I was happy I rinsed the mat thorougly and in the last rinse I added a bit of spirit vinegar (ättika).

I placed the mat on the rack again and let it dry completely, which once again took quite some time. The washing and felting with soap has really turned all the brown-grey rowings into beautiful shades of grey.