Felting an Alpaca Hat

Making an alpaca hat can be challenging, but fun. Fortunately, owning our own alpacas means we have plenty of fleece with which to experiment. We decided to get a hat shaper and make an Indian Jones style felt hat.

We learned a lot making this first felt hat. It took six ounces of prime alpaca fleece to complete.

The first thing we learned was that the hat shaper is slippery. We thought we were doing so well when felting, but the felt ended up with lots of thin spots.

To correct the thin spots, we needle felted new alpaca fleece in each thin area until it was thickened up and then wet felted it again. To avoid having to do this, it would be better to needle felt your alpaca wool together before placing it on the hat shaper. Or other people make a resist to start their hat.

The second lesson we learned was to full it a lot to get it nice and stiff. At first the alpaca hat was just not a good felting consistency. The hat needed to be semi-shaped on the hat shaper and then removed and fulled on our washboard.

We kept returning it to the hat shaper to make sure we didn't shrink it too much. When it fit snugly on the shaper, then we finished felting it on the hat shaper.

You need to let it dry on the shaper and then steam it to shape. Then we returned it to the shaper for final shaping.

We still wanted our alpaca hat stiffer. We bought a very excellent stiffening agent from "Hats by Leko" that, also, makes the hat water resistant.

We wanted a nice leather sweatband and we purchased that from the same place. The hatband was hand stitched inside the felted hat. The hatband made the hat nice and sturdy.

It took us a while to decide to make this hat. It seemed too complicated and we couldn't find any really clear instructions. Once we got going, we figured things out and, even with a few glitches, we are pretty happy with the results of our first hat.

We encourage you to use your alpaca fleece for hat making. It's not as difficult as it seems. The plastic hat shapers aren't as expensive as wooden hat blocks and this one worked well once we figured out a way around the slippery part of felting on one.

An alpaca hat is warm. It is durable. It is fun to make. Give it a try. You can't mess it up too bad. If you have felting needles, you can correct a lot of mistakes and still end up with a perfectly good hat.

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