Yarn Ball Magic. Hold onto your seats.

This is a two part post about yarn. Yawn city, I know.


Part I:
A few months ago my friend Jackie and I took a knitting class. The week before we tried a hippy-mom-yoga class. We were in a "let's try this..." mode. We took the class at JoAnn Fabrics, and we were the two youngest class members by at least 30 years. Shocking.


I learned a few things that night:
1) Knitting is hard
2) You don't want your needle to slip out of your hands or else all hell breaks loose
3) I'm not a knitter


Jackie on the other hand may be whipping up a complete afghan for her baby right now as I type... she totally got the hang of it! I came home and put my new yellow yarn in the "yarn box". This box has been around since college when I went through a "crochet stage" with my friend Ann. That stage lasted a little longer and I was good enough that Christmas that year was fondly referred to as "Megs gives everyone a scarf" Xmas. Sad to say, my skills got rusty and all of the yarn has been sitting in a box for years.


Part II:
I was recently in my favorite Baltimore shop (Trohv, formerly known as Red Tree) and saw these cute yarn balls. I immediately thought that they would be perfect for the "nook" in our living room. (The nook is the bane of my existence. It's a nice architectural touch in theory, but I have not figured one decent thing to put in there since we moved in almost two years ago.)

After admiring Trohv's $14.50/piece yarn balls for about 5 minutes it finally came to me - I could make something similar on the cheap. (The Oprah a-HA moment was a little bit delayed, but I blame that on the Leimabean sucking brain cells on a daily basis.)


Spotting the Trohv yarn balls was going to solve two problems for me:
1.  I would use up the dusty yarn box supply that had been taunting me from the craft room
2. I would finally have something to put in the d*mn living room nook.


Here's what I did:
Step 1: Load up on Styrofoam balls in different sizes. You could make the yarn balls from scratch, but I figured I would be winding yarn until the cows came home. This is a cheap, time-saving trick.

Step 2: Buy fun yarn in different colors/textures. (or deplete your yarn box supply)

Step 3: Start winding. The Styrofoam is sticky so you don't need glue. You just stick the end of the yarn on the Styrofoam, start turning and then tuck in your finished end when you've sufficiently covered the surface.

Step 4: Sit back and enjoy your yarn ball magic. The best part is once I started winding, the entire project took less than an hour. My kind of project.


I know it's a bit kitschy looking, but for the time being I love it and imagine how broke I would be if I had to stock up on Trohv yarn balls? 

And for kicks, here's a fun pic of Frank resting his head on the top step.