I tried my hand at cutting Hobby Lobby craft felt today. Pretty good results after playing around with settings. Hobby Lobby had a variety of felt products. I researched craft felt and found that every kind I saw was Acrylic/Polyester. I am PRETTY SURE that these don’t contain any PVC, but did not do any burn tests and wasn’t able to confirm with Hobby Lobby’s website. OK - disclaimers over.
Here are two of the types I cut. The green is a fairly thick sheet. Sold at 9x12 inches for 79 cents a sheet. They had very thin felt also, but I didn’t pick any of that up. The white is adhesive backed felt. Also 9x12 and 99 cents a sheet.
I lied to the Glowforge and said it was veneer, but then set the manual cutting at 1% and speed at 140. It cut nicely. I also used a sacrificial piece of yardstick underneath. It seemed to cut out some of the “meltyness” (a new technical term) on the back of the acrylic/polyester material.
The green was quite thick for felt and some of the areas in between the center and “arms” kind of melted together. Probably a product of the small size of the cuts. I don’t think current Glowforge settings will allow much smaller cuts. The white adhesive backed felt cut very well. It’s not super soft, but I see cutting some fuzzy santa suits for christmas cards this year.
Here’s a shot of the thickness of the felt. The edges got kind of crispy and hardened, but all in all a pretty good job and something I could never have done otherwise.
Settings were .030 material thickness, 1% power and 140 speed. Your mileage may vary.
I’ve been using newspaper to reduce eliminate flashback from underneath cuts. Newspaper has performed perfectly when I’ve cut wood, acrylic, and cardboard. Maybe it’ll work out for your felt as well!
Great for doing personalized stuff like christmas stockings… My kids picked out the font and we cut them out.
Sticky back…felt is the bomb…lol
If I ever find the pic, Ill share…lol
I use it all the time to line things like sunglass cases, business card boxes and women’s purses. I’ve used both plain (stuck with Loctite or 3M spray adhesive) and the sticky back. I prefer the sticky backed stuff - it gives a smooth surface as you don’t have a chance to overload the adhesive in one area or another.
It’s perfect for backing a living hinge design.
I documented cut testing in one of my Pre-Release dispatches (the one on the sunglass case).
Beautiful results! Do you think you could etch a design into it as well? I have ambitions about making a felt wall for the baby with Forged flora and fauna on it, and being able to put images on the cutouts would make it infinitely cooler.
When the low power setting gets rolled out, but I tried at lowest power and highest speed and it was a bit melty. Lower DPI works but doesn’t look too nice. It’s been a while since I tested it.
I am going to be cutting a lot of Felt.
We have a bunch of quiet books for the kids when we take them to Church. (They are books made out of fabric and felt with little activities for the kids to do.)
One of their favorites is a Noah’s Ark one.
They always seem to loose the pieces.
i’ve also been thinking about something similar (no engraving, just a tiled wall). i’m reasonably sure low power settings are sufficient but you could also do cutouts with different colors and embed them into the felt…of course, that would take rather a while.
Thank you for sharing this – very useful to me. But we DEFINITELY need to find out about any chemicals. I have a feeling a lot of people will be lasering felt now, and I’d feel better if someone in the know could provide safety data.
Thanks for the link! That test seems to be on wool fabric - I was wondering more about side by side comparison of craft felt and wool felt (nonwoven). Probably similar results, but still curious.
