Felting fun ‘Cossack’ hat

Inspiration in progress – what say this should become??? Experimented with some washing machine felting yesterday and this is the resulting piece.

I was pleasantly surprised to see how soft the felted piece remained. As you can see, first of all I had to knit it up and then give it a fairly energetic whirl in the washing machine with some neutral liquid soap to get the felt effect. I could have continued with hand felting to flatten it completely, but decided instead to leave the piece as it is as I really like to see the knitted stitches in evidence.

So here you can see what my piece of mystery felt became – a sort of Cossack hat. I was really pleased with how it came out and decided to do some simple embroidery to decorate the felt crown, and to add a scattering of interesting buttons on the front area of the headband. I continued with the same colour theme of gingernut brown and deep blue throughout – for the embroidery and for the buttons.