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Lesson Info
Creating Ornamental Pom Poms
So one of my favorite ways to ornament a pie on key chandelier is with pom poms and they're really easy to make with one of these little gizmos now when I was a kid in school, we made pom poms where we had cut out two donut shaped cardboard disc and we wrapped the yarn and it was a little bit more of a cumbersome process these little pom pom makers that you can buy in any craft supply store they're made by clover, which is a japanese company, they really make quick and easy work of it they basically come into halves, it is combined with a central spoke and then each half has a pair of extending arms and essentially what we do is we wrap those arms and push them back into the center and then were able to cut the yarn. So I'm going to demonstrate this using some of this really beautiful, brightly colored mexican polyester yarn it's very thin it's a three ply andi I'm going to create a little bit of an ombre pom pom just you can see how to do that, but you definitely can create a pom pom ...
in any color combination you can do it monochromatic all one color or mix it up I'm going to be using three here so the way you start out is you extend one of the pairs of arms out take the yarn that you want to start with, and they usually hold it with my thumb alongside, and then you start wrapping around these two arched components, and the goal here is to completely cover these arches with yarn you want to fill in that entire center section now I'm going toe while I've just gone back and forth with this really bright orange, I'm going to concentrate now on just one end and kind of fill that up because I am going to do ah little bit of an ombre effect, and I want to add in a couple of additional colors, so rapping, rapping, rapping, it will take just a minute. The thing that's great about the pom pom makers is they come in a large variety of sizes so you can create incredibly small ones if you wantto had little details or if you want to kind of make a big statement, you can create a huge pom pom now occasionally it will slip over the top of these sort of feet. You want to make sure that that doesn't happen? You want to keep all of the yarn on the inside? Our goal really is to fill the yarn so that this goes straight across like a little bit of a bridge, so I'm going to switch colors now I'm just going to give us a quick snip set that aside and move on to my second color orange it's a slightly lighter shade same method I'm going to hold the tail with my thumb and then I'm going to start wrapping it around the center now you can see one of the things I've done here is with these smaller balls of yarn I've placed them in small bowls because we're doing so much wrapping if I didn't have them in the bowl that sort of be jumping around the surface of my table and end up on the floor at some point so it's just a little bit of a way to control the madness um all right some wrapping that going to give that a little snip and switch off to my third color this's the lightest of three again holding the tale in place with my thumb and then I'm just gonna concentrate on wrapping that end I love making pom poms you can use all sorts of different types of yarn to create them all with different and varied effects and I'll show you some examples of those in a minute the pom pom makers are also fun because the winding part in particular is something if you have kids or work with kids this is ah portion of the craft that they could easily help with so once I have filled it and it goes straight across filling in that entire arch I'm gonna then close that towards the center I'm going to snip off some of these tales, clean it up a little bit, and now I'm going to open and extend the pair of arms on the opposite side, and I'm going to do the exact same thing all over again, so I'm going to begin with my lighter color it's rapid in now. Obviously, I'm working with fairly thin, lightweight yarn, and so it takes a little bit more rapping, but if you were working with a thicker polyester or wool it's going to fill in much, much quicker switch to my second young can holding with my thumb, wrapping it around that arch, give that a snip and to my final color, holding it in place, wrapping it around just to fill in the remainder of that arch we had mentioned earlier, when I was creating the god's eye structure as an option for the center of the pie on key that those are actually pretty enough, you could use them as a stand alone decoration. They often what great if you place a pom pom on the six spokes that are uncovered with yarn at the very end? It's a nice way to ornament, and it looks really pretty, okay, so I filled that second half in now going to fold that into the centre, go ahead and kind of give it a quick a little trim now there is a ridge between the two halves where separates and it's actually a cutting channel, which is perfect. So you want to take a sharp pair of shears, kind of fit it in the center there and then slowly begin to cut along that ridge? Depending on the thickness of your yarn, you might have to put a little muscle into it. Hey, go! You can already start to see some of the pom pom forming there, going to flip it over and do the same thing on the other side, all rights it's now, it's trimmed all the way around. Now what we need to do is tight in the center, and we're going to create a not that holds all of these fibers together, so I'm going to return to my trusty button and craft thread it's a really strong thread and it's perfect, especially for this lighter weight yarn. Now, if you are using a heavier weight yarn, you could still use this, and I might just double it up so it's a little bit stronger, but what I'm going to do now is I'm going to take this threat, and I'm going to slip it down into that channel that we just cut along, I'm gonna wrap it around to the opposite side. And I'm going to tie a knot and again, this is the string that's holding all of those cut fibers together, so you want it to be pretty taught and tight and then once you've tied or not, you're gonna wrap it again around to the opposite side. This is just something I do to make certain that it doesn't fall apart and tie an additional not again kind of giving it a good tug to make sure it's nice and secure and then I always double knot that very last one, okay, now that we've done that, we're gonna hang on to these strings, the's thread ends, we're not going to cut those because we're gonna be able to use those later on to tie them onto our pie aki structure. Now this is my favorite part. We're going to open up the arms on either side, so you really get to see pom pom forming and then you separate the two halves, you kind of give it a good shake. We've got the basis of a pom pom there, but it clearly needs a haircut, so this is what we're going to do to trim that down. You want to start by, sort of flattening it with your poem into almost a disc form, and then with your sharp scissors, you're going to trim all the way around in a circular fashion when it initially comes off of the pom pom maker, its shape is a little bit more ob along, so you're going to find longer threads of yarn on uh two of the ends you just kind of went around that all off now I want to do the same thing, but I'm going to rotate it slightly, flatten it down into another little bit of a disc and go back in with my scissors and again trim in a circular fashion now we did want to mention for those of you that are on pinterest um I'm really active on pinterest and I have a lot of boards that I use his inspiration one in particular that I love is a pom pom board, so if you want to get some ideas for different color variations, different shapes that you could trim different ways in which you could use them to ornament your pie on key um take a little look we will put a link to it in the materials list for the workshop. All right, so I've done that twice I'm going to do it one more time. Some people like to leave the pom poms a little bit more shaggy others like him to be a little bit more trimmed down and even it's totally up to you I do love the haircut portion, though, makes a nice happy mess on their work table all right so I've done that three times now I'm going to give it another shake and you can see we've definitely got a little bit more fully realized pom pom there and I do like using the multiple colors you kind of see the two shades of the darker orange and then this one that's almost a little bit more of a yellow or an ogre I think they're really pretty so I am going to be making several of these to add to our finished pie aki project today but I did want to show you what the pom poms look like in a couple of the different kinds of yarn now this is an acrylic yarn that's really fuzzy it's great especially for the larger scale pom poms it's really festive it was a variegated yarn so you kind of get this speckled texture which I love uh this is also an acrylic yard obviously a solid color in the red but ah chunk here wait is well eso it makes quick work of those large pom poms this is a smaller pom pom that I made out of wool yarn and I love the wool yarn because it starts to get really fuzzy it's sort of a nice soft effect on dh one of the finished by aki I'll show you at the end of the course I've used this color yarn throughout and then finally one of my favorites you may be familiar with roving or top it's, it's wool that's been cleaned and carded and died. But it hasn't been spun into yarn yet, and you can actually use this in the creation of pom poms by just taking it. And instead of wrapping the yarn around, you would wrap this unspoken roving. The result is really kind of spectacular, because it just looks furry and fuzzy. They're really kind of delicious. Roving comes in just about as many colors as yarn does it's, relatively inexpensive, and I think it makes a beautif com poem. So any of these would make great ornamentation on your pie. Aki chandeliers.
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Ratings and Reviews
April S.
I watched a re-broadcast of this course. It was fun but what I liked best is that Robert Mahar is a good speaker. No hemming and hawing. He keeps the stream of instruction going naturally without uncomfortable pauses (he is prepared) and without falling back on ummming or "you know", or any of that. He was easy and pleasant to listen to and his techniques were shown well making this kind of project accessible to most people.
krish vista
Nice and Beautiful!
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