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 will need the below items to make the felt balls:

  • Felting wool (synthetic fibres like polyester yarn won’t felt; the wool should contain 50% or more animal fibres)
  • A bucket of hot soapy water (dishwashing detergent etc is fine, but avoid strong colours which may stain the yarn)
  • At least 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.

 

So how do you get started to make felt balls?

  1. 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.
  2. Once you’ve formed a ball, dip it 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!
  3. Gently roll the ball from hand to hand, without squeezing it or trying too hard to shape it. It takes a few minutes, but the felt ball will begin to firm up, and the ball shape will become more apparent.
  4. The felt ball will shrink during this process. Once it’s roughly the shape you want, you can decorate it by adding more little clumps of fibre. For example, you can add stripes by using a long strip of fibres and gently working them into the surface of your ball; for polka dots, you can create a little disk of wool fibre and gently press that into the felt ball. Again, your imagination is the limit – can you figure out how to make stars?
  5. Once the ball is decorated to your satisfaction, you need to keep rolling it between your hands in the same way as before until it reaches the size you want. If it dries off before you get there, just gently wet it again, but handle it carefully so it doesn’t come apart!. Alternatively, you can use a flat surface to press the felt balls so they all get the same size at the end. This is good if  you are making large number of felt balls that need to be all the same size.
  6. Once the ball is the size you want, leave it to try!

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. 

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.