Just barely in time for Easter, I made these wet-felted Easter eggs using a technique from Christine White’s book Uniquely Felt. As with most felt projects, these are pretty easy to make but they do take a lot of time.
To make these eggs, or felted stones/balls, wool roving is wrapped around a small form. In this case, I used small plastic snap-apart Easter eggs from the craft store. It’s best to use a non-Styrofoam object that will hold up to the handling, so plastic or stone works well. Many layers of the wool roving is wrapped as tightly as possible around the object with patterns added in the last round or two. It’s entirely personal choice as to how much wool is wrapped around the object, but you need to use enough to cover it well.
The egg is then carefully paced inside of a nylon stocking which is knotted around it. This process is repeated with as many eggs as you want to make. The nylon encased eggs are then gently submerged in warm, soapy water. Squeeze the wool gently around the eggs until the wool begins to compact. Once it’s shrunk a little and seems stable, the nylon enclosed eggs are thrown into a low water level short hot wash cycle (or felted for hours by hand!) one or two times until the wool seems well felted around the object. It can then be thrown in the dryer for a short cycle.
The nylon stocking knots can then be cut and the eggs carefully peeled out of the stocking. Voila!