Machine-felting... what the heck is this evil magic?

Machine-needle-felting my wool/cashmere items makes an entirely different garment from a non-felted one because it adds another additional layer of material. The result created is 2 to 3 times thicker, softer, warmer, and holds its shape a lot better and is less prone to distortion. It also provides enough structure to enable me to machine-embroider and sew sequins on my goodies - something thus far I haven't seen on other upcycled sweater patchwork coats. 😎 If you love the look of my coats and other wool/cashmere goodies and want to try to create them yourself, you cannot make them to look like mine without this amazing machine... at least, not using unfelted materials.  

A felting machine looks like a sewing machine, but isn't. There's no thread or bobbin. The felting machine uses a cluster of needles, typically anywhere from 5-12 needles which all have nasty little sharp barbs on them. The barbed needles punch up and down through the fabric, tangling and matting the fibers together on an almost- microscopic scale. This causes the fabric pieces to mesh together, using no thread. With wool/cashmere fibers, it basically felts the fibers but gives you a lot more control and precision than, say wet felting (aka nuno-felting), or purposefully washing your wool/cashmere in warm/hot water to shrink-felt it - which tends to have mixed, often wonky results. This is what enables me to take a 2-ply cashmere sweater, mesh it in a double layer and create a luxurious, super soft and warm 4-ply cashmere material. I can also take superfine merino wool and mesh the layers together to give it more structure so I can do a LOT more with it. Anything animal fiber becomes magical under this machine. It is AWESOME.

If you want to order a cheapie sample packet to see what various machine-felted fibers feel like compared to non-felted fibers, that is right HERE. 

I am very mad at Babylock for discontinuing this beautiful machine.😡 (Spoiler alert - if you keep reading there is a 2024 cautionary tale further down that to be honest, makes me even more mad at them...)

The machine was sold between 2008-2018 and here's the original product page:
https://babylock.com/embellisher

If you agree with me that machine-felting is super, super cool, please feel free to send a message to Babylock and ask them to bring this machine back into production so you can have a chance to work with it too!😀 You can do that right HERE. 

My machines have names of course - Mr. Stabby, and his backup machine is Sir Lances-a-Lot. It's hard to see here, but this is Mr. Stabby's fabric torturing device. You will see very tiny dots on the needles. Those are the barbs. Mr. Stabby is a 12-needle machine, but the cluster of needles is still only about the size of a finger, and that's why it takes so long to felt a larger surface area. The upside is that this gives me a lot more control. The downside is that it takes a long time to really do this properly, which is why my best work just costs what it does. However, at 900-punches-per-minute, this is still WAY faster than trying to felt by hand. Oh dear, don't do that.🤯 If you want to thicken the layers like I do, you really need a machine. There's just no reasonable way to do this by hand.

Here's a close-up of the needles:

Here is a fantastic video from Groz-Beckert that shows you on a microscopic scale what happens with machine needlefelting (but on a super large industrial behemoth of a machine)...

I really wanted to do a video of my own so you could see "Mr. Stabby" and "Sir Lances-A-Lot" in action, but I found some other videos that cover even more capabilities this machine has, including more than garments and I thought you'd like to see the incredibly wide variety of things you can do with this machine. The 12-needle cluster only covers an area about the size of a finger, so that is also why it takes me so much longer to make my patchwork coats with all the felting work on the bodice, sleeves and parts of the hood (and starting with my pixie-point bottom coats, I needle-felt the skirt panels too). Since I'm using this on something intended as a garment rather than art to hang on the wall, it's important to be very thorough. I don't skimp on time - the idea is that your recycled garment should truly last through many wears. With this machine you can do sooooo much more than non-felted upcycled sweater coats that you might have seen because the machine doubles, triples or even quadruples the layers.... so thin cashmere and superfine merino wool can be made thick enough that they can be used without getting all that wonky distortion/stretching that you'd get if they were just a single layer with less structure and strength. You also can work with other materials, I have just found that animal fibers work best. Oddly, you can also felt fleece for some reason... and when you machine-felt it, it tends to sharpen the pattern almost like sharpening a blurred photo. It's super cool. (I WILL eventually make a video for you of how I use this to make my patchwork goodies, so if you want to know when I've posted that, follow me on Facebook/Instagram for updates.)

All that said, here's some neat videos of this machine in action you might want to check out for the time being.. 

Here's a long one from PBS that goes into a lot of detail, if you're patient.... 

DECEMBER 2024 CAUTIONARY TALE BELOW: 👇

I DO have to add a cautionary tale now, as after lots and lots of felting, Mr. Stabby finally wore out a part this year and died. Babylock is very particular about only selling parts/service thru their dealers, and since my original dealer went out of business, I went thru official channels and approached a new dealer for help. It took about 50 days to tell me that because this model of machine was not used much, there were not enough spare parts to go around... Babylock did not foresee this wearing out and didn't have enough spares manufactured... but because I used it so much, they were not willing to pull any parts off their boneyard machines in order to stand behind their 10-year guarantee on parts. Booooo!👎 Shame on you, Babylock.😒 You would think that by generating so much interest in this machine (out of all my blog posts this one is THE most read and if you Google "machine-felting" this page shows up near the top of search results), they would consider bringing it back, or at least supporting my efforts by arranging a part out of their boneyard they'd be willing to sell to me. NOPE. Not covered under 10 year warranty, and not available for purchase because it's not under warranty...because I used it so much. Babylock, y'all are clearly NOT standing behind your own mission: "for the love of sewing". 😐 

So because of this tiny little part right here, Mr. Stabby died after just five years and became a giant paperweight for almost two months...😢💔

The heart of my frustration with this is that when we live in a society where we build expensive tools, using a lot of non-recyclable plastic to make them and then parts-support is withdrawn too early, chances are high it ends up in the landfill. This stinks way too much like "throwaway culture". This type of wastefulness is bad for consumers and bad for the environment.

In my case, I bought two aftermarket machines because I was afraid this would happen... so in addition to Sir Lances-a-Lot, Mr. Stabby's backup... I also have Captain Slowpants, my own personal 💀boneyard machine💀, (who does not work well and is appropriately named). Thus, the good part in Captain Slowpants was taken out and installed into Mr. Stabby, who was provided expert care at home by my husband and Mr. Stabby is now back from the dead. Yay! 😍 And unlike the staff at the local dealer, he put Mr. Stabby back together carefully and correctly. Not bad for a layperson.😎 Awesome things happen when engineers and mechanically-inclined people have great tools with all the weird, nonstandard bits.  

So I tell you this as a cautionary tale. It is definitely worth looking into whether parts will be available for any machine that you buy. And also, push your local elected officials for better right-to-repair laws. We really need to fight back against throwaway culture. Most people do not have extra duplicates of machines sitting around to pull parts from when the manufacturer stops producing them too early. I sure wish Babylock would have cared more about post-purchase parts support for people that are insanely in love with what this machine can do and that use it a lot, but since we can't seem to fix things thru authorized channels, we'll go punk rock and use unauthorized ones. Yeah!! ✊😈

The entire home sewing industry would do well to care about end consumers and the environment enough to standardize their parts, and to have compatibility charts to help people locate spare parts to keep these machines running and out of the landfill. I know, I'm dreaming again... I have a bad habit of doing that. And please know that  if you agree with me that machine-felting is super awesome, when I ask you to reach out to Babylock, it's not for my benefit as I already found a solution... it's because I believe it would benefit the sewing and fiber arts community as a whole if we all have access to the capabilities these machines offer. I won't lie, it's awesome for me to have cornered the market on machine-felted patchwork sweater stuff😎 (I'm constantly looking and so far no one else is doing what I do in the way that I do it)... but I love recycling, I love helping the environment and I want to fill the world with beautiful art. 

👆 /END OF 2024 CAUTIONARY TALE ABOVE 

Long-winded rant aside, I'll be starting 2025 with a renewed interest in continuing this wacko, weird cool art. The downside to being the only person I know of that's doing these patchwork wool/cashmere goodies using this much machine-felting is there is a lack of machine support and a lot of trouble finding parts. The upside is that all my felted goodies are really cool and super unique and that's awesome and I want to keep making them.😊 I may eventually mix in more non-machine-felted goodies, but those will be clearly categorized so you know what's machine-felted and what's not. If you buy any of my machine-felted goodies for the first time, I usually include a bunch of samples in with your new treasure so you can feel the difference for yourself. 🙂

I have tons of options for you if you're interested in machine-felting. If you're not ready to go all-out on a coat, you can always look into one of my needle-felted hats or arm-warmers.. and if that's too much you can also just order a cheapie sample packet so you can see the difference for yourself before you make a bigger investment, and those are here:
https://www.persephonelove.com/collections/random-oddball-bits  

I am warning you though, the felted 100% cashmere is absolutely luxurious and addictive. When I sell my works at local craft fairs, most folks aren't able to hold the arm-warmers/hats without taking one home. The needle-felted cashmere really is that awesome. 😎

Industrial Grade Felting Machines:

Felting machines DO come in industrial grade versions for felting large areas of fabric, but they are an investment of several thousand dollars. They are SO cool though, I hope one day to own one!! The sound quality isn't so good on this one, but I wanted you to get to see what a larger industrial grade felting machine can do...The machine in the video below comes from Feltloom. 👇

Another company, FeltCrafts, also has a decent demo video showing what you can make with industrial needle-felting machines... so cool!!  The video below is from FeltCrafts. 👇

FeltCrafts is only about ~274 miles away from me, so at some point, I totally want to pay their studio a visit!! 😍Felting is a FANTASTIC way to recycle fibers, especially animal fibers and you can do all sorts of amazing things with needle-felting. I want to own one of FeltCrafts' machines, as well as help generate interest in this wonderful art form.🙏 

On both of those industrial machines, you can see the needles are moving a lot slower, but covering a far wider area. I suspect that it probably takes several passes through an industrial machine to get the same super-felted result that my sweatercoats have. Oh I still want one though... because an industrial grade machine with a bed and rollers that pull the fabric into the machine, would likely enable me to use even more of the super-small odd-shaped wool/cashmere pieces that I typically end up with. I use up most, but not all of the wool/cashmere and have a growing pile that I'm saving in hopes of one day owning one of these fantastic machines. 😍🙏

 Other felting machines...

But what about other felting machines, you say? Mmm.... I have had a few... 

This Simplicity brand hand-held felting machine I tried and it broke within minutes. Maybe it was operator error, but I wasn't impressed..👎

I have also had the Simplicity version of the Babylock Embellisher and it did work, but not nearly as well. 😐 I like to buy needles in bulk from Bethany Felting Arts and her needles work FANTASTIC in the Babylock Embellisher but the Simplicity machine was just really picky and hard to install them in, and yeah... The Babylock machine, as frustrated with Babylock as I am, is just a better machine. The Babylock machine at least has somewhat of a steel body but the Simplicity machine, the entire outer casing is plastic. It just feels cheap and seemed like it was a lot more prone to bouncing around on the table. If a Simplicity machine is the only one you can get your hands on, it might still be worth it even just to try... but it may be even more impossible to get parts for than the Babylock one, I'm not sure. 

If you already have a machine and you need needles, Bethany Felting Arts is the way to go. Her Ebay store is right here: https://www.ebay.com/str/bethanyfeltingarts

She has an Etsy shop too, so if you prefer to buy on Etsy her Etsy shop is right here: https://www.etsy.com/shop/BethanyFeltingArts

Also - I don't do "affiliate links", so there's no financial incentive for me to ever steer you one way or another. I prefer it that way. Do check out the rest of my blog posts, there's useful stuff there whether you are a coat-shopper or just an idea-shopper. If you dig up anything here that was massively helpful or inspirational or that just made you grin from ear to ear, you can always buy me a one dollar bag 'o sparkles and it is greatly appreciated. 🥰 My virtual "tip jar" is here:
https://ko-fi.com/persephonelove

Truth be told though, your likes/shares/follows on social media are worth a LOT more to me, though🥰 .. and your virtual support on social media costs you nothing at all. 😎 Here I am on social media:

Facebook

Instagram

Pinterest

And if you're one of my fans/followers, thanks sew much!! 🥰 I hope this was an enlightening read. Oooo if you dive into the world of machine-needle-felting, send me a photo of your first project - I would love to see it. 
👉persephone@persephonelove.com👈

Looking for more sewing tidbits?

• Read more about SERGERS..
• How to conquer the ZIPPER in a supercool way..
• Where I get my SUPPLIES...
• Read more about COAT MASTERY...