Knitting And Felting A Seat Pad From Un-Spun Wool Roving
Did you maybe read my recent post about our chair-odyssey?
In that post you can see a photo of our table and the Adelaide chairs with little sheepskin pads in them.
I ordered those little fur pads because the plastic chairs seemed a bit cool especially in wintertime.
Honestly I did not like those little sheepskin pieces when they arrived - the white ones were bleached and the grey ones were dyed and I do not like such artificial treatments on a natural product.
But we kept them anyway because we needed something in the chairs.
Now I finally came up with a new seat pads idea.
I didn't had to think too hard about it because chunky wool is always on my mind:)
I just took my spare 500gr samples of un-spun wool roving and knitted seat pads with my fingers in stockinette pattern.
Of course you can also use large (25mm thick) needles for knitting these.
I am located in Germany and wrote already in this DIY post where I obtained my roving and large needles.
I have chosen those varieties above simply because they were less expensive.
I can recommend all except the Herdwick! It looks interesting BUT it's extremely linty - even after felting.
I started by chaining 7 or 8 with just my fingers (depending on the thickness of your roving and on how large you want your seat pad to be) as I would want to crochet.
Last year I made this video with DaWanda where I also show, how to chain with your fingers.
Out of the back of this chain I cast on my stitches.
Knit about 9-11 rows or until almost all yarn from the 500r ball is gone, cast off and weave in the endings.
I just left the endings as is because I think it looks kinda cool.
If you decide about the size of your pad keep in mind, that the finished pad will shrink a bit during felting in the washing machine.
Here you can see how large mine were before felting - I put my flip-flops next to it so you get an idea about the actual size.
The pad on top is already felted - the others not yet.
I felted with normal but short 30degree cycle. That's different from how I felted the large grey blanket I showed you last week.
I wanted the seat pads to be even more durable since a lot weight is always on them.
It's still a good idea to start felting in the wool cycle because you can always run another cycle over your piece if it is really not felted enough.
But you can't undo it if you already felted too much.
Also every washing machine will be a bit different.
If you are going to use the normal 30degree short cycle like I did, your felted pice will look pretty crumpled when you take it off the machine.
Don't worry!
It's best then to bring the still wet pad back to its original square or rectangle form by pulling strongly on all sides. It's easier when you can do it with another person so you can pul in opposite directions.
Lay flat and let completely dry after you brought it back to a good shape.
Here you can see my finished felted seat pad.
It was the first one I made a few weeks ago and since then I use it in my Muuto chair.
And here are the others ones...
