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crochet (provided it is made with a minimum of 70 percent animal fiber) into dense wooly goodness. Unless, of course, felting is the horrible thing that happens to you (and more likely the non-fiber-literate person in your household who also does the laundry) when the washing instructions are ignored or your favorite 100 percent wool item is accidentally thrown into the washing machine with the jeans or towels.
    If you have never tried a felted project before, I highly recommend it. It’s a lot of fun to cruise along crocheting at the speed of light (big hook, big stitches), weave in the ends in the most sloppy way possible (because, after all, they will felt in anyway), and not worry too much about gauge or shape (because any minor fudges will all come out in the wash, as they say). You wind up with a flimsy sort of oddly shaped something if you aremaking a purse or bag, or a garment that would fit you and three of your closest friends. Then you throw it in the washing machine, do your thing, and it comes out looking exactly like you wanted it to.
    Well, more or less. Felting is more of an art than a science—your results may vary. My results vary, too. Every time I felt something, I have all these grandiose ideas that measuring and swatching and testing ahead of time will tell me exactly what I am going to pull out of the washing machine, and yet I am always surprised (sometimes pleasantly, sometimes not) by the results.
    The great news about felted fabric is that whatever you end up with will be acceptable in one form or another. As long as you are a flexible type of person, that is. I designed a felted purse pattern recently that had absolutely no relationship whatsoever after it came out of the washing machine to the sketch I had made. No resemblance whatsoever. It was funny and scary at the same time how wrongly I’d guessed about how the piece would change shape while it was felting. That said, I changed the title, did a little fiddling with the way the closures were set, put the original sketch through the paper shredder so no one would know how very wrong I was, and sold the design anyway. It may not have been what I expected, but it was still a pretty cool purse.
    If your felted piece comes out from the wash and you simply can’t stand it, the very good news is that you can cut it up with a pair of sharp scissors and make it into something else. Unlike woven fabric it won’t fray, so cut away. Stitch the pieces into something else, throw a blanket stitch edging on, and crochet around it. If all else fails, cut it into 4-inch squares and call them coasters and act as if that’s what you meant to do all along. No one will ever know!
    I started on the slippery path to felting addiction with knitted pieces. They worked out fine, and one Christmas everyone in my family (whowould appreciate them) got felted slippers. But then I started thinking about felting in crochet. Crochet has a structural quality to begin with so you can easily make all kinds of shapes. Crochet goes really really really fast so you can get to the fun part, the actual felting, quickly. Crochet is a pretty dense fabric from the get-go, so you can get an extremely thick and cushy end result, or crochet with a finer gauge wool and get soft and flexible felted goodness. In other words, crocheted felting ROCKS.

Scrumble Fever
    S
crumble
is a word that I thought was a typo when I first ran into it. In fact, as I am writing this, the computer
still
thinks it’s a typo. It’s the word for a building block of free-form crochet—you make a bunch of scrumbles containing any stitch or fiber you choose, made in whatever manner suits you, and then you join them together into something larger.
    Start with a hook and some yarn and just work in whatever direction they take you—scrumbling is sort of like doodling, only with yarn instead of with pencil and paper. The glory of free-form crochet is that it can be anything you want it to be, even if you