There is much confusion about the terms above. Bear with me for just a little background.

Wool is a natural fiber that has a scaled structure. Wool fibers can be processed several ways: woven into fabric, knitted into fabric or sweaters, or layered into felt. If you take either woven wool fabric or knitted wool and throw it in your washer, add hot water, agitate, cold water rinse it and toss it in the dryer, what will you get? A shrunken wool mess. But if you process it a little more carefully you can control the final product.

There's a lot of fabric being marketed as boiled wool. Basically it has been partially shrunk but the woven or knitted structure of the fabric is still visible. It still has some bias stretch and depending upon how much it has been shrunk it may or may not ravel slightly.  Usually this wool is used for wool applieques with the edges of the appliques stitched in buttonhole stitch. 

FULLED wool, on the other hand, has been processed more. It has been shrunk until the woven structure of the fabric is no longer visible. It is quite thick, usually more than 1/4 inch thick, has no bias stretch and the edges do not ravel or fray. In other words, the scales on the wool fibers have opened up, interlocked, then when you cold water rinse hot dry the fabric, they shrink together and close up. It looks like very thick Polar Fleece. This is what I make quilts out of. I recycle old woolen clothing into fulled wool or I buy new woolen yardage and hand dye it then full it. This process is outlined in detail in my article, "Fulled Wool Quilts" which appeared in the Winter 2003 issue of American Quilter magazine.

Good heavens! What was I thinking?

Actually, there is some logic behind this. In the winter of 2000 I was trying to come up with an unusual crazy quilt to enter into a competition that was to be held at the Minnesota Quilters annual show. As I studied my other crazy quilts I realized that, because most of the construction seams on crazy quilts are sew and flip seams, the majority of the seamlines are straight. Many crazy quilters diligently work to add curved lines into their quilts: appliquéing in curved pieces, adding curved lines of embellishments, etc. What would it look like, I wondered, if there were NO straight lines in a crazy quilt . . . . only CURVED lines?

The idea of piecing all those curves discouraged me. I know several ways of doing it but none of them thrilled me. Too bad there wasn't some fabric that I could just lay two layers together, rotary cut a curved seam then abut these curved cut edges and machine join them together.

There are two fabrics: Ultrasuede and fulled wool. Ultrasuede seemed to be lacking in the "cuddly" factor, but wool. . . . I thought I'd give it a try.  My first fulled wool quilt, "Only Curves Crazy" is shown below.

I used old 100% wool clothing bought at second hand stores, took the clothing apart and fulled the wool in my washer. Along the way I discovered that when you put wool in boiling water a LOT of dye gets released. So when I found a white wool cape to take apart, I started throwing pieces of white wool in with the colors to soak up the released dye (and get lighter shades of wool). This eventually led me to buying 30 yards of white wool from a rug hooker to start hand dyeing many shades of colors.

In ONLY CURVES CRAZY I used many different machine stitches to join the pieces together, using variegated Pearl Cotton threads. Since this piece was to be for my husband it has only a few Ultrasuede appliqué embellishments: a Loon, a Painted Trillium, a moose, a wolf and some pine trees. The edges are curved also. The backing is a red plaid cotton upholstery material. This piece does have a cotton batt in it and is machine stipple quilted. With the fulled wool you really don't need a batting.

To see another sample of a fulled wool crazy quilt please click here.

To see a sample of some thread embellishing on fulled wool, please click here.