Today was a beautiful Maui Saturday and a perfect day for soaking wool! The first step in all of our handmade felt projects is to pre-soak the wool. The felt we use is a wool blend felt that will shrink quite a bit if exposed to water from rain or due to spot cleaning. To allow for normal enjoyment of your items (you should never wash your felt gifts, just spot clean with clean warm water), we pre-soak the wool felt in clean water and hang it to dry in the warm Maui sunshine, before we do any embroidery work or cut into the fibers of the wool. This allows the wool to shrink and the colors to set a bit. It’s a lot of extra work and wait, but it’s worth it! And I just love looking out the window and seeing all that beautiful felt swaying in the breeze!
Once the wool felt is completely dry, it’s gently ironed to remove any wrinkles and then stored flat until time to become lovely keepsakes! After hanging this set of wool to dry, I got to work printing packaging labels and product inserts to prepare for opening up our shop in a few days – I’m so excited! Here’s a sneak peek at some of the items I’ve been working on that will be included in the shop opening…
Well, that about does it for my Saturday. Hope you’re all enjoying your weekend!
Mahalo!
- jennifer