How to make leather-look felt
May 6, 2008 by Cyndi Lavin
Filed under Home & Living
Technique Tuesday!
You’re not going to believe how easy it is to do this surface treatment. I’ve asked people to try to figure out what the material is without letting them feel the backside of it, and they always guess leather! Like I said yesterday, it looks a lot more like leather in real life than it does in my photos.
Materials:
Square of white felt
Fusible web
Extra heavy acrylic gel
Soft acrylic gel
Acrylic paints – raw sienna, burnt sienna, interference goldTools:
Iron
Parchment paper
Foam brush
Paper towel
Heat gun
This is a great idea, but could you please clarify what is fusible web? Where do you get it? I have not heard of this product.
It’s a thin woven sheet of glue! You can get it at any fabric store…Wonder Under is one brand that is widespread. Usually it’s used to iron two pieces of fabric together, but in this case, you’re only ironing it to the top of one piece.
So you paint on the fusible web? Not on the felt side? Does that mean you could do this technique on other fabrics too, or even paper, since you’re not really using the texture of the felt to contribute to the final feel? (Or am I missing something?)
Well, yes and no! The felt actually does contribute to the texture since the webbing is so thin. But on the other hand, it would be very fun to see what did happen with other fabrics.
I would stick to felt or thick interfacing to get the leather look. The other reason I chose felt was because I wanted something easy to sew through
And it would be fun to see what happened with paper, I forgot to say!
It looks like you used the cheap felt found in craft stores or Walmart, not wool felt. Am I right? I hope so as I have a lot of that stuff around and now that I’ve used wool felt for beading I don’t like the feel of the other stuff. This would be a good use for it. Maybe in other colors too.
Yeah, the cheap stuff. It might be…what? polyester? Other colors would be fine too, since you’re going to paint it. It might be interesting to try more transparent washes of color on a colored felt base…
….and (probably to state the obvious???) I guess that by adding a final coat of some sort of acrylic medium (i love polymer gloss varnish) would give the “leather” a more long lasting finish??
It’s great – I’m going to have a bash with my mixed media group – they’ll love it!
cheers
Oooooo…the gloss topcoat would make *shiny* leather! (See, I can state the obvious too
)
Great tutorial, Cyndi. Thanks for posting it. I do believe I’ll have to try this. I have gel medium, but not the extra heavy. Do you think that will work okay?
It never occurred to me to paint on felt before. But I have used a heat gun on it to melt and distort it. It works well for that.
Did I miss something? When do you use the heat gun?
I love doing faux things. People are always so intrigued by them.
Thanks for another great idea!
Thanks Val! Yeah, I don’t see why you couldn’t do the the whole thing with plain gel medium. Just let it build up a bit and texture it…maybe add a few more thin layers.
Oh…I forgot to mention the heat gun! I just use it to dry the medium because I’m much too impatient to wait till it air dries
You could get it really close to the medium and make the stuff bubble and froth a bit for more texture if you wanted to.
This is so neat, Cyndi! Great technique for making the exact shade of ‘leather’ for doll shoes!
Excellent, Noreen! I never thought about doll clothes…it would be so much easier to make small items from the felt than from real leather…
Cool, too bad we can’t touch it!