Trials of an apartment Dweller, AKA: Why Coin Op Felting/Fulling sucks! August 24
First of all, there is no option to change the length of the washing/ agitation cycle, this means that if it doesn’t felt in 10 minutes of agitating, tough luck. Wait out the next 20 minutes of the machine cycle, watch a ton of water get dumped out and pumped back in for the spin and rinse cycles and try not to feel guilty for wasting all that heat and water. Then feed another dollar and fifty cents into that machine and start all over. It’s simply impractical. As much as I can be fascinated by the effects of playing with wool to make felt, the practicalities of doing it aren’t any fun for me right now.
Obviously I just spent an hour in the laundry room…
When you live in a coin op world quarters are worth more than 25 cents, we go to a lot of trouble to herd enough quarters to keep us in clean clothes. To offset the guilt of wasting hot water and precious laundry quarters I threw two rugs in. I knew they were dirty and I was likely courting a mess of cat fur to mix into the felt swatches, but I took my chances… argh! The 10 minutes of agitation wasn’t long enough to finish the swatches to my liking AND they proved to be excellent cat fur magnets. So I have not-yet-fully-felted furballs.
With a neighbor who had absolutely no curiosity as to what I was doing hogging the washer as long as I was finished in the same amount of time a normal wash takes peeking in regularly to see if I was done yet, I resigned my post at the washing machine.
Sigh.
Now to find a pal who will let me loiter at their home and use their washing machine…