Fabric Definitions — definitions of fabrics, cloths, laces and textile materials from Apparel Search
Felt is a cloth made without weaving — a non-woven — produced by matting, condensing and pressing fibers together. Loden is a type of felt originally worn in the Alpine regions, which has gained worldwide acceptance as a textile for fine and durable clothing.
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Felt requires no loom, no spinning and strictly no yarn: loose fiber, water, heat and pressure are sufficient, which is why felting is plausibly the oldest textile technology, older than weaving in the regions where woolly sheep provided the raw material. The process scales in both directions. At the domestic end, a maker lays out batts of carded wool, wets them, and rolls or rubs them until the sheet consolidates — shrinkage is the felt forming, as fibers pull the mass tighter while they lock. At the industrial end, needle-punching and steam pressing produce felt in engineered grades: soft felt for hat bodies and craft sheets, hard pressed felt for gaskets, seals, polishing wheels and piano hammers, where the same fiber-locking that makes a yurt wall makes a precision component. One mechanism, tuned by fiber choice and pressure, covers the whole range.
Felt's non-woven structure gives it a set of properties no weave matches. It has no grain, so it cuts in any direction and the cut edge does not fray — there are no threads to unravel — which makes it the default material for appliqué shapes, insoles, craft work and gaskets. It is uniformly dense, so it insulates, deadens sound and cushions impact evenly across the sheet, and it absorbs vibration in machinery mountings. Its limits are the same structure's other face: felt has lower tensile strength than a woven cloth of the same fiber, stretches and distorts under sustained load, and once felted cannot be un-felted or adjusted. Apparel felt therefore lives where those trade-offs win — hats shaped from a single felt hood, loden coats, slippers, linings — while woven and knitted cloth carry the loads that need strength in a direction. Knowing felt means knowing it is not a failed weave but a different answer: fibers locked directly, with nothing in between.
Wool fibers are covered in microscopic scales pointing toward the fiber tip. Under heat, moisture and pressure the fibers migrate in one direction and the scales interlock, tangling the mass into a single sheet that cannot be pulled apart fiber by fiber. That one-way ratchet is the felting mechanism; smooth fibers such as most synthetics felt poorly or not at all without blending or mechanical needling.
Wet felting mats loose fibers into sheet felt using water, heat and pressure or rolling. Needle felting uses barbed needles to push fibers into one another mechanically, dry — the method for sculpted felt figures and for industrial needle-punched felts, where banks of barbed needles entangle a fiber web into a sheet.
A type of felted wool cloth originally worn in the Alpine regions — dense, fulled and weather-resistant, traditionally in dark green — which gained worldwide acceptance as a textile for fine and durable clothing such as coats, jackets and hats. Loden shows felt construction carried to apparel quality.