Pincushion Love

Not sure why, but I just love pincushions. When I see them in shops, it doesn’t take much to get me to go for that second look, especially if they are home-made and unique. BUT, they MUST be functional or I completely lose interest!

Have you seen or used the wool pincushions? Here’s a picture of a teeny one I love to take along to classes:

This isn’t a great picture because it’s made of several cool colors and I’ve got it so crammed full of pins that you can’t see the pretty colors! If you haven’t made yourself one yet, they’re a SNAP to make! You start with dyed wool batting like this:

You pull off a small wad into your hand and then add some warm water and liquid soap and just start working it, agitating it gently. Keep adding new scraps of different colors of batting and build it up to as large as you want. You’ll want to make it larger than the desired finished size, because it will shrink later on. Anyway, just keep adding and make sure at the end that you really like the colors on the outside, because that’s what you’ll see. Place it into an old piece of pantyhose and pop that baby into the dryer for about 20 minutes and just let that dryer bounce it around and agitate it. Take it out and you’ll have a lovely felted ball! Don’t like your colors after all? No big deal, just get it wet and soaped up and add some new colors of batting and repeat the process. These pincushions are great but I always glue a wooden scrap on the bottom because they’re so lightweight that when you pull out a pin, the whole pincushion comes with it! And you’ll love the feel…pins pierce it just like buttah!

Here’s a cute little pincushion I made a couple days ago. I think I’ve fallen in love with it because it’s so small:

And here’s some pieces of pincushions-to-be:

…but you’ll have to wait til tomorrow for the finished products!

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