Lots of people at Open Studios wanted to know how I coloured my felt so here is a brief run down for anyone who is interested.
This method has the advantage of being completely kitchen safe, so you don’t need different pots and pans. The basic requirements are wool felt, food colouring, white vinegar, cling film, and a veggie steamer.
You need to use 100% woolen felt or it will not work.
Start by washing the felt in hot water with some dish detergent, when I am doing a big batch I often put a big pot of water on the stove with lots of detergent in it and simmer the felt for 20 mins or so.
Rinse the the felt well to get all the suds out. Soak the felt in a mix of 50% white vinegar and 50% water.
Lay down an area of cling film bigger than your piece of felt, you may need to overlap a couple of rows if the felt is large (make sure you protect the surface you are working on somehow from being stained by the food colouring).
Take the felt out of the vinegar mix and lay in on the cling film – don’t wring out the felt leave it quite wet with the mix. You can now paint the felt with food colouring, I use gel icing colour for cake decorating but you can use the basic stuff from the supermarket and it will work just fine. You can blend and shade and mix colours as much as you like.
When you are done fold the edges of the cling film into the center and roll the felt into a bundle that will fit into your steamer. I use a large aluminium steamer for dumplings that has two tiers so I can do two layers at once.
Steam for 15 mins then carefully remove and leave to cool – the felt will be super-heated be very careful and give it plenty of time. Once cool give the felt a good rinse in cold water, and hang out to dry.
Note that the vinegar changes some colours when you paint them on, most notably purple, dark blue and red they can look quite muddy or in the case of purple they go very blue but you will find they recover their vibrancy after steaming. I kind of enjoy not knowing exactly how things are going to come out till they have been steamed you get all kinds of surprises.
The hardest colour to get is black – usually it splits and you get a weird greeny purple (with can be kind of nice in itself). You just need to experiment with different types of colour and see what happens!