Happy Mother's Day, and a Pom Pom Flower tutorial
Sunday, March 15, 2015
Happy Mother's Day! We're very lucky, our family gets to celebrate two different "Mother's Days" each year. One for the UK tradition (today) and one for the South African tradition (in May). Because really, there should be a mother's day every month shouldn't there?
To celebrate, we made pom pom flowers. You know, as you do. Especially when your house is more-or-less overrun by pom poms aplenty. Ooh, poofy.
If you don't have pom poms lying around waiting to be made into something fabulous, you can make your own from scratch. There's the tried-and-tested cardboard rings method, or the oh-so-fun instant-pom-pom version using a Clover Pom Pom Maker. Obviously I'm zipping through my scrap yarn with the maker: all you need to do is hold the yarn quadruple (or more if you're feeling reckless) and wrap it around the arches of your preferred size. Cut through the wraps as per instructions, tie up, and you have a pom pom in about 20 seconds.
I use the green pom pom maker, which is the smaller size from the Large Size pack. Giant ones (the blue one) look great too if you like added fluffiness.
You'll also need some florist wire (or craft wire), green felt, a kebab stick or skewer and green florist tape. You could use paint instead of florist tape, or wrap green yarn tightly around the stick, but the florist tape makes this a super speedy craft and cost me a princely sum of 75p online.
Start off by cutting out a leaf shape from your wool felt. You could do any shape and size you like, but I liked one large floppy leaf (but mostly because I'm lazy and didn't feel like adding lots of little ones along the stem).
Then, thread a length of craft wire through the end of the leaf and bend the wire over so that it's ready to wrap around your stick.
Push one end of the stick into the middle of the pom pom and secure in place by wrapping the wire down the top bit of the stick. This doesn't have to be neat because you'll cover it up later. Position the leaf about a third of the way down the stick and secure in place by wrapping the wire around again.
Then wrap wrap wrap with florist tape, starting at the top and making your way down to the bottom. Adding this kind of leaf is easy: you'll need to bend the leaf back to get right down to where the wire joins the felt, and then bend it back up and fold it around the stem and start wrapping again.
That's all. Easy peasy. Now, go make some more.
Warning: you may be tempted to use up ALL of your other scraps of yarn and create a huge bunch of long-lasting oofy-poofy flowers.
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