We love pom poms here but they’ve not been out for a while. Long autumn nights and evenings watching Strictly are here though, which means some winding of pom poms can happen and some cute crafts too. I’m still busy experimenting with making realistic patterns from different wool winding techniques but here are our first two scruffy cats. One has wool pom pom ears and a tail made of strands of wool tied together (Maddy did that one) while Amelie made one with a flat felt tail and felt ears.

On the left is Top Hat Cat. He’s made from two colours of yarn (Sirdar Hayfield Double Knit Acrylic which is easy to use and nice and cheap!) which are wound simultaneously to give a speckled look. Amelie glued an extra large and large medium pom pom together to make the body and added tail, eyes and nose with felt pieces.

It’s always handy to have plenty of felt on hand (I like to keep wool blend felt in my cupboard as it is good for lots of types of crafts but the Dovecraft Acrylic Felt packs are brilliant value for decent felt too). The green scarf was a ‘not quite rectangle’ strip – it had a slight kink in it to make bending round the neck easier. After that we made the hat, which went like this:-

1. Cut out a rectangle of felt to the desired size and overstitch the two short edges together.

2. Place the cylinder on some felt and draw round it to make a top circle.

3. Overstitch that on to one end. Turn it through. The result is suitably scruffy and banged up – perfect for an alley cat.

4. Place the cylinder on felt, draw around it once close to the edge and again with a wide margin (inner circle and brim). Cut out the bigger circle first, then cut out the smaller circle so you have a ‘doughnut’ shape.

5. From underneath, overstitch brim to hat.

6. Cut two slits for ears. Cut out some felt ear shapes in cat colour, poke them through the slits and glue the whole thing to the cats head, making sure you also attach the ears so they don’t float free!

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Maddy’s cat was inspired by an Aristocat and is wearing a beret. She made it with a circle of felt all glued and tucked under into the right shape, with a tiny matching pom pom made from yarn on top. He has pom pom ears (very cute) and a yarn tail.

We’ve got more Cat Crafts on Pinterest and more Pom Pom crafts too.