Wool Wall Hanging
Hi Everyone! You may have seen wool wall hangings around for the past few seasons as boho decor continues to be a popular way to create a cozy living space. Often there is a lot of macrame knot work involved that would take a lot of time to make, but this simple wall hanging is a fun project that is easy to do. If you would like to add some fiber art to your home, read on to learn how you can make one too.
What you will need:
Birch branch
Wool
Scissors
Tape
Coffee (or dye)
Get more wool than you think you will need. To help with your estimate, these three balls of wool covered two feet of my birch branch and were 186 yards each. I would have preferred to use a thicker type of wool, but I live in rural area and this was all I could get at my local wool shop. I chose a neutral color as well 100% wool as it is easier to dye than synthetic wool. If you are not going to dye your wool, you can use any type and any color that you like.
Hang your Birch branch in the place you plan for it to be, and hammer in a few nails to rest it on. Take a piece of wool and measure how long you want the wool to hang, and then double it before cutting it. Because you will be hanging the wool over the branch, each piece you cut needs to be twice as long as the length the wall hanging will be.
This piece of wool will now be your measuring tape, so hold it one hand and pull the string on your ball of wool until it is the same size. Then cut it and repeat until you have cut all of the wool and have a nest of wool pieces.
Next, hang your branch somewhere you can easily wrap the wool around it. I rest it on a corner section of my kitchen counter, but you can hang it anywhere you can access both sides of it. A clothes drying rack also works.
Take two strands of wool together and fold them in half so that there is a loop at the top. Put the loop over the branch and then pull it towards you from underneath, and then slip the strands through it. Pull the strands to tighten the loop so that it is snug against the branch. You can use just one strand for each loop, or more than two strands. When covering a knot in the wood, I find it helps to use four strands for better coverage. Continue until the branch is covered.
I knew that I would be cutting the edge bottom edge of the wool hanging, so I used some of the shorter pieces of wool I had for the center of the branch. Then I found this picture of a mountain to guide the type of cut I wanted to make. You can find it on Pixabay here and it is free for commercial or personal use.
I used the Save Ink tool from the Rapid Resizer program to turn it into a black and white line drawing. You can also use the free Picture Stencil Maker to transform a photo this way when you need to make a pattern for a project. Then I resized it to fit my wall hanging, which is two feet wide so it printed out across 4 sheets of paper.
I hung the wall hanging back on the wall and taped the printout behind it. Then I cut the wool to follow the shape of the mountain. You can also cut the bottom into a V shape, or waves, or a semi-circle. Even simple shapes benefit from having a printout to guide your wool cutting.
If you are not dyeing your wool, then your project is finished! You can just leave it on the wall where it is.
If you are dyeing it, read on. I don’t tend to use dye as I always stain something somehow when I use it, so I chose to use coffee instead for this project to add a darker tone along the mountain silhouette.
To do this, bring the wall hanging back to the place where you cut the wool if it works to have towels there for the wool to drip upon as it dries. If you are using real dye, then you will want to set up a plastic tarp with old sheets or towels over it that you don’t mind getting dye on.
And this is how my wool hanging turned out in the end! If you have any questions please comment below, and if you are inspired to make one using these techniques please share your photos with us.
Happy Creating!
~Melissa