felt

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felt

felt, fabric made by matting or felting together wool, hair, or fur, most of which have a natural tendency to snarl or cling together owing to their notched or scaly surfaces. Processes of manufacture vary according to fibers used and purpose intended. Woven felt is first made into coarse cloth, given a heavy nap by teaseling, then ironed down. True felt is made by placing the cleaned fibers in the shape or mass desired, then beating, steaming, pressing, fulling, or otherwise compacting them to the required thickness. Impregnated felts, designed for industrial uses such as roofing and sheathing, are made from waste and sometimes from paper treated with a stiffening or waterproofing substance. As an art, felt making probably preceded spinning. Felt was used in N Asia for clothing and tents, and the felt hat was known in ancient Greece and Rome. The invention (1846) of a machine for making felt first brought about the great popularity of the felt hat for men.

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Felt

a lining, sealing, heat- and sound-insulating material made by a matting process. There are several kinds of felt, with different properties and uses. In addition to wool (the most common felt) and semiwool felt, there is also mineral felt, made from mineral wadding on an asphalt binding, and felt made from chemical fibers. The basic types of felt are (a) technical (coarse, semicoarse, and fine wool), with a density of from 0.09 to 0.45 g/cm³ in the form of ribbons, sheets, and ready-made pieces, used for gaskets, stuffing, shock absorbers and wicks in automobiles, tractors, combines, and airplanes, for the drive shafts and other components of textile and paper machines, for polishing tin (felt polishing pads), for musical instruments, and for prosthetic devices; (b) everyday, used in shoes, soles, and harness-making; and (c) construction, used for warming the ends of wooden beams in external stone walls and the seams of boards in prefabricated buildings.

Felt

a wool or wool-blend fabric made from yarn, whose face is so compacted as a result of fulling that the weave is concealed. Felt usually has a plain or twill weave. After being subjected to intensive fulling, the cloth shrinks lengthwise and, especially, breadthways (up to 50 percent) and acquires an extremely high density. Felt comes in various thicknesses and is distinguished as being fine, semicoarse, or coarse. It may be napped or napless. Felt is used mainly for winter coats, suits, and uniforms. It is used industrially for filters, packing, and automobile and furniture upholstery.

Cotton felt fabric resembles felt made of wool and is often used as a substitute for the latter, especially for school uniforms, quilted coats, and ski suits. There are a number of other fabrics besides felt that are made from yarn subjected to fulling, for example, cheviot, tricot, broadcloth, castor, and baize.

felt

[felt]

(materials)

A fibrous, watertight heavy paper of organic or asbestos fibers impregnated with asphalt and used as an overlining or an underlining for roofs. Also known as felt paper.

(textiles)

A compressed, densely matted unwoven fabric of wool, sometimes with rayon or hair.

felt

An unwoven fabric, composed of fibers which are matted together, usually with the aid of moisture and heat, by rolling or by pressure; usually manufactured from cellulose fibers from wood, paper, or rags, or from asbestos or glass fibers.

felt

Nonwoven material built up from fibers or whiskers of carbon, glass, asbestos, etc.

felt

a. a matted fabric of wool, hair, etc., made by working the fibres together under pressure or by heat or chemical action

b. (as modifier): a felt hat

2. any material, such as asbestos, made by a similar process of matting

Collins Discovery Encyclopedia, 1st edition © HarperCollins Publishers 2005

References in periodicals archive ?

Kyrgyzstan also exported 465.4 kg of floor covering made of felt, mainly to Germany, Canada, UK, Japan.

Kyrgyzstan exports over 12,000 kg of felt in 2018

"Needle felting is only limited by your imagination, so anything you can think of you can pretty much felt if you have enough time and energy to put toward it," says Theresa Bergman, co-owner with Sandra Lee of The Artist's Palette Studio.

Poke and play

Mortality rates during an average follow-up of 99 months were 14.3 percent in adults who felt younger, 18.5 percent in those who felt about their actual age and 24.6 percent in those adults who felt older, according to the study results.

Feeling Young? Lower Early Death Rate

The two methods can be combined - a wet felted landscape is enhanced with needle felted mountains or animals, for example.

Heartfelt hobby; Felting is fiber art for everyone

She recommends reading "Uniquely Felt" (Storey Publishing, 2007), by Christine White, to learn basic techniques.

Felting transforms raw material into work of art

Almost half felt booze made then 'able to fit in socially', 40 per cent felt less anxious and 31 per cent felt they could make friends more easily.

Drinking' to feel better'

I felt her lace and hands pressed hard against my glass screen, and I panicked.

Choosing strawberry milk: Nicci Dodanwela tells the story of how she overcame anorexia

Eventually I decided to tell her how I felt. First, I told her that I was gay.

Outspoken

Maybe Mark Felt knows what his true motives were, but one thing is certain: he didn't sneak around with reporters Woodward and Bernstein because he was outraged over wage and price controls.

Felt, Nixon, Vietnam. (LETTERS TO THE EDITOR)

Suddenly every atom of my being felt nurtured; every ounce of my essence felt well and light.

In defense of happy pills: why talk to a shrink if Prozac or Zoloft will do the trick?

The prevalence of homophobia is a severely damaging influence on GLBT youth (Gibson, 1989), who are nearly three times as likely as their heterosexual peers to have been assaulted or involved in at least one school fight, three times as likely to have been threatened or injured at school with a weapon, and nearly four times as likely to skip school because they felt unsafe (Massachusetts Department of Education, 2000).

Counselors' perceptions of sexual minorities

As for Vera, things were a bit more complicated, she admitted: while she "experimented" with boys and "felt normal in every way, I felt this need for women....