Felt Acorns

I have been seeing these around the web lately and wanted to try some myself. 

I had a wee bit of a learning curve but finally figured it out!

I bought my wool roving in little bags from Hobby Lobby.  The bags are really tiny so I thought I would need alot of them since I had never done this before.  Wrong!!  Just one color from the bag makes a huge amount of felt balls to use for making acorns.  I way over bought!

First set up a small bowl with dish soap and HOT water.  Then tear off a small section of the wool.

Dip the wool into the hot water, remove and start gently rolling it into a ball in the palm of your hands.  Drop it into the water again and pull out and continue to roll it between your palms.  The wool will slowly start to form a tight ball and you can apply a little more pressure once it has formed up.  Just roll and roll it until you have a nice tight ball.

NOTE:  This is NOT the size you need for acorns!  This was my first try and wayyy over judged the size of wool I needed.

Make sure you keep the water HOT while you are rolling the wool.  (Obviously don't scald yourself!)

No matter how much I rolled the wool I always had a  crack.  To easily fix this I would just take a few more fibers, dunk in the water, place over the crack and continue rolling in my palms.

If you think your acorn might be too small for the cap, just grab a few more fibers and dunk them in the water and wrap around your ball.  Then dunk the whole ball in water and continue rolling until you are happy with the size.

Once I had a nice tight wool ball I would then place it under running water, while still rolling it between my palms to get  rid of some of the dish soap.  Very gently squeeze some water from the wool ball and then place on a towel to dry completely.  Dry at least 24 hours.

I gathered some acorns and removed the tops.  I wanted a pop of color so I spray painted the tops a Bahama Blue.

Once everything is dry, use a glue gun to attach the wool ball to the acorn top.

There are different ways to felt with wool but this system worked best for me.

Next year I might use turquoise wool roving and keep the acorn tops natural.  I'm also going to try  red wool roving and natural tops for Christmas time!

These would look great around napkins,  collected in a bowl or maybe attach some fine thread and hang from something!

Linked with Skip to my Lou, Made by You Monday.