To Felt or Not to Felt?

Diaper covers, that is! Felting in and of itself is lots of fun and super helpful in many applications. This post is sort of the "pre-post" to the major post I am working on this week, which will compare the various types of wool covers available!
If you do a Google search about felting, you will come up with lots of results, not too many of them helpful. You will find things that tell you to ABSOLUTELY NOT ALLOW YOUR WOOL COVERS TO FELT OR THEY ARE RUINED!!!! and others that tell you that IF YOUR WOOL COVER ISN'T FELTED, IT WON'T WORK AS WELL SO WHY ARE YOU WASTING YOUR MONEY??? And of course, you'll come up with lots of webpages showing tutorials on how to felt, etc. both for diaper covers and other crafty type projects (wool dryer balls, anyone?). My husband's mother has a wool business (she dyes, spins, and knits and all kinds of other fun stuff) and has since he was a young child, so he and his siblings have lots of experience/insight with felting! :-)
So here's the deal with felting. As with just about anything else, felting has both pros and cons. Some types of diaper covers actually need to be felted in order to work, and others will do fine without that step and work better without it (the next post will have more details about that).
Felting is a process by which you force wool to shrink and tighten up-a lot.So much, in fact, that the individual fibers will not ravel even if you cut the material. Basically, felting causes all the little fibers in the wool (or yarn, or....) to stick VERY tightly together. There are various degrees of felting (something can be VERY felted, or not much). The main things that cause wool to felt are heat and friction (rubbing of the wool against itself). This is why you can't just toss your knitted wool covers into the wash and then dryer.
Pros: A felted diaper cover will have fewer (or no) little "holes" between yarn stitches because all of those fibers are tightly connected and "stuck" together. It is also easier to wash because you don't have to worry about not felting it (it's already felted!).
Cons: While knitted or crocheted pieces will have a lot of stretch, felted pieces will not. In fact, felted wool does not have any stretch at all. This means felted pieces will not be as versatile in terms of being able to fit your child for multiple sizes (potentially). It also means that you may have to work a little harder with the wool in order to get it to fit well for your child. Felting is not reversible, so if you accidentally felt a cover that you did not intend to felt, it's felted for life.
Remember when I said in my post that I like to make diaper covers using roving instead of yarn? Part of the reason is that, when divided off properly, roving fibers tend to stick to each other, giving you many of the advantages of a felted cover, but because it is still knitted, it is a loose "stick" and therefore you still have stretch. The other nice thing about roving is that, like felted covers, you can adjust the thickness as desired instead of being stuck with just a certain weight of yarn. You can sew felted pieces together to "double up" the thickness if desired/needed-with roving, you just divide off a thicker strand.
Stay tuned for a post comparing various types of wool covers (the ones I plan to showcase are interlock, knitted/crocheted with yarn, knitted/crocheted with roving, and upcycled felted ones). Let me know if you have questions or want to see something specific covered!