A Chavet Project: Re-felting and re-gluing weights.

@KineticPawn  The compass cutter I used is an Olfa brand, made in Japan. The cutting tip is surgical sharp. The issue with using a compass cutter on baize and most fabrics is the floppy nature of it. Cutting fabric circles with the tool can be done, but it will take more patience. The stiffened felt I used is slightly rigid like cereal box cardboard. Once I got in a groove, I was zipping through the square swatches one right after the other. Maybe try stiffened felt on one set (or even half a set) to see how it works out for you? It's cheap enough to experiment with at $2/sheet. 

Two possible baize solutions:

Repositionable adhesive. Krylon sells one. It's low tack and temporary. Just apply a fine mist on the baize and temporarily affix it to a smooth sheet of cardboard (tissue or cereal box). Do your cutting. Then remove it from the temporary cardboard "backer". 

Tacky cutting mat. Amazon sells generic tacky cutting mats for 8 bucks. The stickiness of the mat will hold the baize firmly in place while you use the compass cutter. Check out "cricut cutting mat" on YouTube.

I haven't used either of these methods, so there is a bit of trial and error. But I have confidence that it can definitely be done. Good luck!

Excellent result! With a little patience, perseverance and order you can achieve simple and effective things and one can notice the order in the fact that you have positioned the pieces in exactly the same way in the last shots!

Yes, excellent - on the compass cutter. I purchased a Swiss-made unit - which seems high quality. That’s said, it was no match for the thick, floppy baize that I am using - it just couldn’t cut through due to the movement of the cloth and I had to resort to small, high quality fabric scissors which I purchased at the same time as the compass cutter; they were brilliant. I think it is mentioned in this thread but my approach was to paint glue on the base of the each piece and then push the piece onto a strip of baize… and repeat. After the glue dried you have many pieces on the strip of baize. I then used a Stanley knife to cut away each piece from the strip and then scissors to trim away excess felt in each piece. It worked a treat. 👍

@jacmater  Hah! Thank you for noticing the detail of those last 2 photos. I thought the composition was rather nice, so I made it the same. 

@Powderdigit  The stiffened felt I used is nowhere near the same ballpark as high-end woven baize you and @KineticPawn are using. We'll see how long the stiffened felt holds up. This isn't restoration work or anything. I have beater Drueke and Lardy sets from the 80s and 70s with felts that are still fine. That's 40+ and 50+ years respectively. I'm cool with that. I'll definitely get some baize scraps in the future though. Just to compare out of curiosity  

@Powderdigit that's a shame about the compass cutter not working with the floppy baize.  Would you mind posting some pictures of your work? 

Hey @KineticPawn - so as not to hijack this thread - I posted some pictures on this Dogface thread. The last posts show the result of applying baize to my Dogface pieces. It was my first attempt and I am really happy with the results. 👍