hand felting

I'm still working on my bag that I was knitting at Christmas. I realized today that the first pocket I made for it was going to be too small to use so I decided to just hand felt it instead of undo it. I can cut it out for a flower to pin onto the bag or something. That was hard work hand felting! The way it is done is you take your knitting and submerge it in extremely hot water (I used my teapot to heat the water on the stove) then you use a little soap and the rest is elbow grease rubbing the wool together to create friction and continuing to dip it into the hot water. You do that for 5 minutes or so and then you rinse it in cold water to lock the fibers in place then start the process over again. I did the process 5 times and am very happy with how it turned out. When I go to do the bag I'll be using my washing machine instead of doing it by hand but I'm glad that I did it at least once so that I could see the process from start to finish. It was pretty interesting.