Simple Crafts

A craft for everything & everything in a craft.

Scruffy Cats in Pom Poms & Felt.

October 21, 2013 by Merry Leave a Comment

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.pompom cats

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.

 

Filed Under: Cats, Pom Poms Tagged With: aristocats, cat craft ideas, cat crafts, pom pom cats, pom pom crafts, pom poms, pompoms

Easter Pom Pom Creatures

March 25, 2013 by Merry Leave a Comment

Maddy twizzled up a window display in pom poms and foam sheets this week to cheer up the frankly unimpressive winter weather and make it feel a little more spring like at home.

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Our trusty pom pom makers (coming soon to a brand new online craft shop near here ๐Ÿ˜‰ are favourites with us and the rabbit and chick are made from the 2 medium large sizes. Any dk yarn will work – Sirdar and Robin do cheap ones. Some big googly eyes glued on, with the head and body also glued together (PVA works well) and ears, feet and beak cut out of foam sheets complete the look. Maddy finished the scene off with foam grass banks and pom poms made in several green, yellow and brown shades to make bushes.

I rather liked the nest – its just the end of a ball of brown wool fluffed out underneath that Easter chick. I have to say the rabbit looks a little nervous, but that is a VERY. BIG. CHICK.

Filed Under: Animals, Easter, Pom Poms Tagged With: easter bunny craft, easter chick craft, easter craft, Easter pom pom animals, pom pom chick, pom pom rabbit, pompoms, spring craft, spring window display

Christmas Pom Pom Swag

November 10, 2012 by Merry 2 Comments

This craft is one we did last year and put up at home; I think it was the thing that made me truly fall in love with the decorative power of pompoms. It looked beautiful, far greater than the sum of its ยฃ1.50 ball of yarn parts and was one of the things we put away to bring out again for this Christmas. There is something delicious about the mix of colours, the plump pom poms and the non-Christmas theme of it. It really added a chic touch to our very ordinary living room.

We bought about 15 colours of yarn, in big 200g balls of cheap acrylic; each pom pom was made by winding two colours together. The pom pom on each side contained one of those colours, which just gave it a nice gentle changing feel as it went along. Blues, reds, greens, yellows, purples and golds all seemed to work really well together. We used medium pompom winders and did both colours at once, so they were quick and easy to make. We threaded yarn on to a wide ended needle and doubled it twice, so there was a really strong core holding them together and then pushed the needle through the centre of each pom pom.

christmas pom pom swag decoration

This could easily be altered to suit any colour scheme, with metallic threads or other decorations dangled between. It was one of my favourite elements to our living room for all of last Christmas, so much so that I replaced it with a rainbow swag while we waited for the birth of our baby boy in January!

This craft was first featured on Patch of Puddles, our family blog.

Filed Under: Christmas, Difficulty 1/5, Pom Poms Tagged With: Christmas craft, Christmas swag, Christmas window decoration, pom pom craft, pom pom decoration, pompoms

Rainbow PomPom Swag

August 22, 2012 by Merry Leave a Comment

To celebrate the birth of our little boy, we made a gorgeous rainbow pompom swag to hand in our front window. It’s been a really popular feature on our blog so I thought I would add it here as our pom pom rainbow craft. It was either that or make an entire rainbow from them and frankly, I do not have the energy to even attempt that!

We used our pom pom makers for this craft and cheap and cheerful acrylic yarn from our local cheapy shop. Makes for a perfect craft that everyone joined in with. We all took a size of pom pom and went from very large to medium sized ones, doing half and half colours on each maker. The middle two are the largest size and half red/half orange and then the range slowly out in the same pattern through the colours, with blues and whites for sky and clouds at each end. It ended up hanging in the window for months, cheering up the room in the face of some extremely miserable British ‘Summer’ weather.

This would work beautifully as a group project in a classroom or as part of a greater weather project. I seriously considered windows full of silver threaded raindrops, snowballs, a huge fluffy sun and clouds hanging from the ceiling!

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Filed Under: Difficulty 1/5, Pom Poms, Rainbows Tagged With: pom pom craft, pompoms, rainbow crafts, rainbow swag decoration, rainbow window decoration, weather project

Christmas Tree in PomPoms

August 8, 2012 by Merry Leave a Comment

I know it’s a bit early for Christmas yet, but I thought this Christmas tree from last year was just too good to miss – and it completes my craft collection for trees for now ๐Ÿ™‚ Last year we treated ourselves to a set of these pom pom makers and really enjoyed making Christmas decorations with them. My favourite was this little scene we created and the tree has ended up being a keeper. We love it.

christmas pompom treeThe tree body is made up of the largest 3 sizes of pom pom, tacky glued together. We wound the pom poms in 2 colours of green wool, nice cheap Robin DK wool from our local pound store. The tree is sat on a slice of loo roll covered in brown felt, the star is a tiny pom pom and then we covered it with lots of minute pompoms from our local supermarket craft section. It looked gorgeous all through Christmas. As you can see, the pom pom snowmen also really approved of it ๐Ÿ™‚

Required: pom pom makers or card rings, wool, felt, loo roll, glue, decorations.

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Filed Under: Christmas, Difficulty 2/5, Pom Poms, Trees Tagged With: Christmas craft, Christmas tree, easy craft, pom pom craft, pompoms, tree craft

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