Felt balls

I wrote yesterday about I wasn't really into the directions for felted balls on Quick and Clever Felting. But it's been years since I made my last felt ball, so I thought I'd give it a try.

The first step in the directions calls for pulling off a length of fleece roughly 10 cm long, then wetting "the strand" with hot water and rolling it up into a ball. If I were to follow those initial directions, here's what I would get.
Not at all a ball shape, nor does it look like the picture in the book. The picture in the book in fact shows a flat, and what looks like dense, piece of fibre being "wrapped" into a ball shape. The pre-directions said that you could wrap the fibre around a core, but that wasn't mentioned in the actual directions. So then I guessed that maybe the instructions meant I make some prefelt, then tear off lengths from that.

Except I felted it a little too much, and it was very hard to tear.

So finally I just went with what I had remembered from various felt tutorials online, which is roll some fibre into a ball, get it wet and soapy, and then very gently start rolling it in your hands, applying more pressure as the ball starts to harden. I did not alternate between hot and cold water as some tutorials suggested.

The ball on the right was done with directions from the book, the ball on the left was done with just rolling tufts of fibre. The difference in size is because I used more wool for the one on the right. There's not much difference between how the two look, if anything the one on the left looks slightly better I think.

Here's two tutorials on how to make felt balls. And I'm planning on following this one soon, which suggests using a washing machine and pantyhose.