We live in one of those houses that has a LOT of white walls. This is mostly cool with me, white is a good base to decorate and add colour to and it looks nice and bright. The one (teeny tiny) part of this whare that I'm not a fan of is the toilet ( we're talking about a separate toilet and bathroom here). It's a litte white cell with no character or personality and because it's tucked away at the back of the house we've pretty ignored much it (apart from the obvious necessities). It gets cleaned and used and that's about it.
I decided to try and make this yucky little claustrophobia-inducing space a little bit pretty. The beginning is this pom-pom garland but I have a few more ideas (brightly coloured crochet lace curtains and some kind of wall art perhaps).
As I do with most things, I figured this out as I went along and hoped for the best. It really was the quickest, easiest afternoon project, I didn't have to restart it a single time!
If you're familiar with needle felting already then you probably don't need a how-to but if you're not here's a quick run down of how I made my garland. Be warned, this is the cheap, figure it out as you go along guide to making felt pom-poms. If you want a proper tutorial with pictures and correct official instructions and terminology, I suggest you go put those words into a search engine because I don't do those things here. Disclaimer aside, here we go:
- Take your needle felting needle, which probably has a proper name but I'm not one for technical terms when you all know what I mean anyway. Needle felting needles look like this and are really sharp. Don't go poking yourself in the fingertip with these ones if you can avoid it.
- Take your needle felting wool, which again, has a proper name that I don't know. It looks like this but you really only need to grab off a little bit of it, don't use a whole big bunch like in those images.
- Take a large piece of foam or sponge to put under your work - this helps to avoid stabbing yourself with those sharp needles I mentioned.
- Roll your wool into a vaguely round shaped ball and start stabbing at it with your needle. Needle felting needles have little grooves on the sides of them which catch the wool fibres and kind of mix them and smash them all together to create this wonderfully dense felted thing.
- You'll notice as you go that the more you stab, the denser the area gets so you're going to want to roll your work around in your hand so that you can stab it evenly all over for an even, smooth surface.
- If your pom-pom is feeling a little small, or a bit lopsided, tear off some more of that felting wool and place it against the part of your work you want to join it to and stab some more. The stabbing will again, mash those fibres up into one lovely mess of a thing that is hopefully looking circular by now. If not, stab where you want it to shrink and add more wool where you want it to grow. Stab more to smooth it all out.
- Repeat until you have a nice pile of felted pom poms to make into a garland. I made 9 in navy and purple because those are the colours I had sitting around.
- When your pom poms are stabbed to satisfaction (very therapeutic this needle felting thing, hey?), thread a needle (a regular hand sewing or darning needle) with the yarn or thread of your choosing (or whatever you have lying around, like me) and push that sucker through the centre of your pom-poms.
- You can knot the space in the thread next to your pom-poms if they don't feel snug enough to stay put but mine didn't need this so I skipped it.
And you're done! Super quick, super easy and super likely to make all the felting gurus out there cringe a whole bunch. I think if there was a needle felting god, I would totally be banned from needle felting heaven because of my sins against wool fibre crafts.
