Our tutorials will often instruct you to take a piece of wool. You can do so by gently pulling with your hands or using scissors. If separating wool with your hands, first thin the wool by gently separating it laterally. Then, you will find it's much easier to pull from both ends to separate it. Depending on the texture and thickness of the wool, some types may be much easier to separate than others. Some wool blends are so soft you don't need to thin them at all to tear off a piece. If it's really hard to tug apart, rather than brute forcing it, just thin it more laterally before you pull it apart. If using scissors, it's recommended to snip into the fibers rather than cut directly across them. Bluntly cut wool fiber pieces do not blend as well as wool fiber pieces with more natural edges. Naturally separated edges are thinner and longer than bluntly cut edges, which makes it easier to hide them and seamlessly felt them into the rest of your piece.

Our tutorials will also instruct you to fold pieces of wool to make them thicker or shorter or both. When you are folding wool this way, you want to fold "hamburger" style: fold to make the longest side of the piece of wool shorter, at its halfway point.

When working with wool fiber, it's important to keep in mind that the more you felt it, the denser and smaller it gets. Our tutorials give approximate lengths and widths of fiber as suggestions, but don't feel pressured to be exact. The more you work with wool fiber, the more you'll develop an intuition for how much fiber is needed.

When you're wrapping wool around a borb base, or adding layers of wool to a piece, as much as possible try to preserve the fibers going in the same direction. This will give a uniform look to your piece, especially where all of the same color fiber is used. It's not always possible depending on the shape of the piece, of course. When possible, avoid making the fibers on your piece of the same color or detail overlap perpendicularly. (If you want to create details that are visually separate, like a bird's striking cap that pops out against its back color, of course placing the fiber in an opposing direction will give the desired effect.) In the image on the bottom, I have placed fibers on an incomplete borb's head which run both askew and perpendicular to the fibers already on the borb's chest. It looks more polished in the images above where the fibers all run in the same direction on head and chest. You can also blend wool fiber colors by placing light colored wool on darker wool, and vice versa. For the best effect, again preserve the direction the fibers are running in.