A Woolly Christmas

It feels like this Christmas I have gone pom pom crazy. But they are so versatile and great fun to make. I wanted to make a wreath for our front door and couldn't decide whether to make a rag wreath, pom pom wreath or pillow wreath. At the quilting shop round the corner they have loads of rag wreaths in the window. They look fantastic which made me think I might be disappointed if mine didn't turn out so good. When we got our Christmas decorations out of the cupboard there was a small bag of pom poms I had made a couple of years ago when we didn't have any decorations, they were quite cute. This made me decide to make a pom pom wreath.

I used four shades of green yarn, mainly double knit acrylic. Bottle green, khaki green, bright green and mint green. Using multiple strands at the same time makes making the pom poms loads quicker. I made 14 pom poms using the large pom pom maker in my Japanese set. Then I ran out of one of the greens so this determined the size of my wreath. I got some thickish wire and threaded it through the pom poms as if they were beads. As I did so I pushed them together quite close so that you could no longer really see the ball shapes of the individual pom poms. This made a really nice dense effect that I had not been expecting. I decided to keep them tight together which meant my wreath was to end up quite small. I twisted the ends of the wire together and covered it with a pretty gingham ribbon loop and bow. Then I trimmed all the stray bits of wool, it was a bit like wooly topiary with green fluff everywhere. I hung it on our front door where as you can see compared to our door knocker, it is quite small - but I think it's cute.

Here's some more pom pom Christmas joy. I saw these on a blog and couldn't resist having a go myself as I have some dolly pegs in my craft stash. 

First I painted the hair and face, clothes and shoes on the peg with acrylic paint. I used a really fine brush to do the face and jewellery details. For the skirt I decided to use a mixture of textures. I used a couple of different thicknesses of white yarn and cut long lengths from each ball so that I could wrap four strands instead of just two at the same time. I used red lurex glittery yarn as well to dot the 'skirt' with red to match the jewellery I had given my peg. Lying on my craft room floor was also some scraps of white tulle so I cut that into long strips and wrapped them round at the same time as the yarn. I had to be careful not to overfill the pom pom maker so that I could still get the peg through the middle. Then you just trim and tie off the pom pom as normal and it is nicely tied to the peg. I didn't give her wings as she isn't really a fairy. I have posted her to my friend Holly instead of a Christmas card. I hope she doesn't get attacked by Arnold, Holly's cat.