When a Cosy Decides to Become a Hat!

This is the shape that I was going to use for my French Press or cafetière cosy.  I used the felting art batts I made on my new blending board that the hubs made me.  There were 3 in total.

I must have had a senior moment, because I really wasn’t thinking clearly when I laid this out.  I won’t go into all of the details, but sometimes we can have an off day.  I did use another new toy on my felt and that was a sander!  I know, electricity and water do not mix, but if one is careful and has plenty of plastic (dry) in between the sander and the wet wool, you will be ok.  I have one of those sanders where you clip the paper on the bottom, but instead of sand paper, I have bubble wrap clipped on instead.  We bought it quite cheap from ScrewFix.  The hubs did some research for me.  It was supposed to be used for making layered flower brooches, but I have seen others on YouTube use it, mainly the Russians, on scarves and other things.  I love how they like to save time and their inventive ways!  So, after wetting and folding all of the wool down, I took out the sander and worked on both sides.  It only took about 5-10 minutes before I could roll it, instead of about half an hour or more.  I still worked the sides by hand.

When I took out the resist, I started to full the piece and it started to shrink alarmingly quickly.  This is when I realised that my resist wasn’t wide enough for the cozy.  I need to rework my maths on this one again.  In any event, I placed the piece on my smallest hat form.  It needed a little stretch, but I managed it and thought it should be turned into a hat.  Waste not, want not.  It was fulled enough, but not hard.  Although the batts are nice and fluffy, and there were quite a few layers laid out in different ways, I laid out the wool really thinly.  Some people like to slap the wool on the blending board.  I like to lay it out thin.  Especially for this felting batt, which is different from a spinning batt, where the fibers are all laid out in one direction.  The felting batts also make nice scarves!

The hat was still soapy when I squeezed it on the hat form.  The rounded corners lended themselves to being shaped.  The swirly pattern is unusual, but I did play around with the top for awhile to get it how I wanted.  I then took it to the sink and rinsed off all of the soap in hot water while leaving it on the form.  I wanted the top part to shrink a bit more.  Once the soap was all out, I rinsed in cold water.  I then played around with the brim, stretching it outwards.  I haven’t been able to get a decent photo, but the brim does flare out a little bit.  I would have liked to full this hat a bit more, but it is a perfectly good, soft hat.  It is very lightweight and the silk shimmers.  I think there was some silk in the mystery fiber too and that helps to make it strong.  I am quite happy to wear this hat out and about.  Now all I need to do is actually make the French Press cosy!