Patreon for Mongolian felt making creators

Mongolian felt — called esgii in Mongolian, and produced primarily from the wool of fat-tailed sheep across the steppe and semi-desert pastoral zones of Mongolia and Inner Mongolia — is among the oldest and most structurally essential textile traditions in Central Asia, distinguished not by surface decoration in the first instance but by its fundamental architectural role as the primary insulating skin of the ger (the portable round dwelling also called yurt in Turkic). A standard ger requires between three and five layers of esgii panels to achieve adequate thermal performance across the extreme temperature range of the Mongolian steppe, and the total felt area needed to cover a typical ger — walls, roof, and floor — is approximately eight to ten square meters, making felt production a major labor undertaking that historically structured the seasonal calendar of nomadic herding households. The tradition’s centrality to Mongolian pastoral life was recognized formally when UNESCO inscribed the Mongolian Ger and its associated customs, including felt-making, on the Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2013.

The Mongolian diaspora — concentrated in South Korea (approximately 35,000 people, the largest overseas community), the United States (20,000–30,000), Germany (15,000–20,000), Japan (approximately 10,000), the United Kingdom (8,000–12,000), and Australia (approximately 5,000) — shows iOS device adoption of approximately 62 to 68 percent. South Korean and Japanese Mongolian communities exhibit the highest iOS rates (70–78%), while USA, Germany, and UK communities range from 65 to 72%; the weighted average across the full diaspora settles at 62 to 68 percent. At $200 per month with 63% iOS: $37.80/month ($453.60/year Apple Tax); at $300 per month with 65% iOS: $58.50/month ($702/year); at $500 per month with 67% iOS: $100.50/month ($1,206/year) extracted by Apple’s iOS commission on Patreon subscriptions. KeepTier routes all subscriber payments through Stripe web checkout at $9/month flat, eliminating the iOS routing premium entirely.

The felt-making process centers on the örgömj reed mat (sometimes constructed from bamboo or bound stick bundles in regions where reeds are scarce) as the primary rolling substrate. To begin, cleaned and carded wool — drawn from fat-tailed sheep, and occasionally blended with goat or camel hair for specific density requirements — is teased into an even layer and laid out on the flat reed mat in aligned cross-layers, with fiber orientation alternating between layers to build structural isotropy in the finished felt. The prepared wool layers are soaked with hot water mixed with ölt (animal fat or lard), which lubricates the fiber scales and accelerates the thermomechanical felting reaction by reducing inter-fiber friction at the first stage of entanglement while the mat is still open. The mat is then rolled tightly into a cylindrical bundle, bound with ropes to maintain tension, and subjected to repeated mechanical agitation: the bundle is rolled back and forth on the ground by hand, trampled underfoot (the traditional Mongolian technique sometimes described as “rolling with feet”), or in some regional variants tied to a horse and dragged across the steppe at a slow trot, the bouncing and dragging providing the compressive and shear forces that drive fiber entanglement. The bundle is unrolled periodically — typically every thirty to sixty minutes in traditional practice — and the partially felted wool sheet is repositioned on the mat, sometimes with additional fiber added to thin zones, before re-rolling and continuing the process. The complete rolling sequence for a full ger wall panel requires three to six hours depending on the target thickness and density.

The ger felt system is differentiated by panel type and function, each requiring a distinct thickness and density specification. Khana felt panels cover the expanding lattice side walls of the ger and must be both insulating and flexible enough to follow the khana lattice’s folding geometry. Unï felt strips (roof rail panel felt) wrap the angled roof poles that connect the khana wall-top to the central crown wheel, requiring narrower panels cut to conform to the pole angle and spacing. Toono felt is the cap that covers and insulates the circular crown wheel at the apex of the ger — the toono’s smoke hole is the ger’s primary ventilation and light source, and its felt cap is adjusted throughout the day to regulate airflow, meaning toono felt must be especially dense and weather-resistant. Floor and bedding felt (hana in some regional terminologies) is the thickest and least refined, produced from coarser-grade wool and valued for compressive resilience under foot and body weight rather than fine surface quality.

Surface decoration on finished esgii takes two principal forms. Hevtee patterns are embossed designs created by pressing carved wooden or bone molds into the wet felt surface at the final stage of rolling, before the felt has dried and set; the pressure-formed relief patterns — typically geometric motifs drawn from the broader Mongolian decorative vocabulary of interlocked spirals (ulzii), cloud bands (khamar), and stylized animal forms — become permanent features of the dried felt surface without requiring additional fiber or thread. Ologdoi embroidery, by contrast, is applied to finished dry felt using heavy wool or silk threads in chain stitch and laid couching techniques, building color and additional design complexity over the felted ground. Patreon creators documenting Mongolian felt-making for diaspora audiences find consistent engagement with content at two scales: the macro-engineering of ger construction sequences showing how esgii panels integrate with khana lattice expansion, uni pole geometry, and toono crown wheel assembly; and the micro-mechanics of fiber behavior during the rolling process, where slow-motion footage of the ölt-lubricated wool transforming under trampling pressure into coherent felt sheet provides the kind of process visibility that diaspora audiences who grew up knowing the finished ger but not the production process respond to with strong retention and tier-upgrade behavior. The Apple Tax at 30 percent of iOS subscriptions extracts $37.80 to $100.50/month from Mongolian felt-making Patreon creators at these revenue levels. KeepTier’s Stripe-only processing eliminates this routing tax entirely at a flat $9/month fee.