Washing felt food

I have now been making felt food for a while, and my children are not mistreating it. Even then it does get dirty and dusty with time and I have been wondering what I could do to get it clean. Vacuum-cleaning is a little difficult and washing with water isn't supposed to work with felt.

Then last month when I was in France, my sister M. told me that she is simply putting everything in the washing-machine on a gentle and cold program. She hasn't noticed any damage on the various felt objects.

So I decided to give it a try with first the ice-creams, the farfalle and the tortellini.

Here's the result:

The green and orange farfalle haven't changed shape at all, on the other hand the yellow ones have dramatically shrunk and the tortellini probably would have to if they had not had filling and a rather "unshrinkable" shape. I just had to pull them a little bit back in shape. 

The ice-cream cones (I forgot to make a picture) have also retained their shape, they only appear to bobble a bit. That is probably due to the presence of velcro bands. I probably also used too strong a spinning program.

My last observation: the felt fabrics that I bought online on www.vbs.com is perfectly fine, the one I bought in a shop in town (Karstadt for those who live in Germany) is the one that shrunk. And I must say that I never really liked its quality from the start, I just use it because I have it! So from now on, I will keep on testing the washing-machine cleaning of our various felt objects and I will only buy on my favourite website ;)