experimenting

I'm starting to experiment with making hats. I got some hat forms and a shaping dome from Hat Shapers, which makes hat forms designed for feltmakers. The process is to first make the hood, and in its partly felted state, shrink down the hood onto the hat form. I've made hoods by molding fleece around a two-dimensional resist, but I thought using the shaping dome would more easily create a symmetric hood. 

I thought I would skip a step by laying out the fleece directly onto the dome, estimating the surface area of the dome  and the amount of fleece needed for the desired shrinkage and density of the final felt. I lay out the fleece and got this delightful bon-bon confection to the right. But apparently, I would figure out the amount of fleece incorrectly.

The result was a cap that was much more dense than I had planned. Afterward I checked the manufacturer's documentation, perhaps a review I should have performed before starting a hat. Ah. They lay out their fleece in a rectangle, get the felt started, and then shape the felt around the dome.

I think initially laying out the fleece in a flat rectangle is a more reliable method of defining the desired shrinkage and  density than starting the layout on the dome. Perhaps if I had made a better estimate of the dome's surface area, but I vaguely recall that this might be a calculus problem, which I haven't touched since college. Being able to consistently control the shrinkage and density is important for production felt making, but perhaps making it a calculus problem is overkill!