How To Make Felt Balls
If you’re looking for a simple craft project to use up some wool fibres, keep a child occupied, or create something unique to decorate your own space, making felt balls is a quick and easy way to achieve all of that at once.
To start, you need the following items:
- Felting wool (synthetic fibres like polyester yarn won’t felt; the wool should contain 50% or more animal fibres)
- A bucket of warm soapy water (dishwashing detergent etc is fine, but avoid strong colours which may stain the yarn)
- At least five to ten minutes of time per ball
It’s really that simple to make felt balls, which means it’s easy to set up, easy to clean up, and a good fast project for a rainy day.
You can use yarns of different colours to decorate the felt balls you make – your imagination is the limit.
How To Make Felt Balls Step By Step Guide
Step 1. Wrap the yarn to make it look like a ball
Once you have your yarn, you need to start with a small wad of yarn, and wrap more of the fibres around it into a rough ball shape. You want to make this ball about twice the size you want it to turn out to be in the end. Repeat this process until you have a desired number of balls.
Step 2. Soak the rolled yarn into hot soapy water
Once you’ve formed the desired number of wool ball, dip them into the hot soapy water – if you’re doing this with a child, make sure to supervise them and check the water isn’t too hot! You need to totally saturate the fibres with water. At this point, it will seem irregular and untidy: don’t worry!
Step 3. Start rolling the balls by applying some pressure
Put the wet balls on a flat surface and apply light pressure from top with another flat surface and roll the balls gently. You can use both clockwise and anti clockwise motion to roll the balls around until the wool balls get some round shape.
Step 4. Squeeze water from the felt balls
Gently squeeze the wool balls to drain the soapy water and place the felt balls back on the flat surface.
Step 5. Apply more pressure on the wool balls
Just like in step 3, start rolling the balls with a flat surface, but this time, apply more pressure. You can do this by adding more weight on the top. By now, you should have achieved a proper round shaped wool felt ball.
Step 6. Wash the felt balls with cold clean water.
Put these felt balls in clean cold water and extract them by giving it a good squeeze to extract the water. Repeat the process for all the felt balls.
Step 7. Dry the felt balls.
The last step is to dry these pom pom balls on some flat surface to dry. Once they are dried properly, you will have the best looking felt balls that you have made yourself.
If you are time poor and need to get lots of felt balls made, you can purchase these felt balls from us at very competitive price.
Polka Dot And Swirl Felt Balls
There’s all sorts you can do with the finished yarn balls, depending on their size. Ornaments, jewellery, toys… Because it’s a simple and easy technique, it’s almost endlessly versatile. Give it a try! We hope you'll find this 6 little steps on how to make felt balls useful to undertake your own felt ball project.