Flannel's Not Just for your Husband's Shirts!

A few weeks ago, I was digging through my Google Reader and found a fabulous tutorial by Eddie Ross. You can see Eddie's original tutorial here. I bookmarked it, and yesterday was the day to actually give it a try!

I've been looking for some cute things to jazz up my house for winter, since the Christmas twinkle is gone. These adorable little flannel-covered guys seem to do the trick!

So here's what you do. Start with some flannel shirts. I got mine at Goodwill for a few dollars a piece. Seems like it's better if they're 100% cotton; Eddie says you get fewer loose threads that way. I also bought some Styrofoam balls at Michael's. Mine are 3 inches in diameter, but you can go bigger or smaller, whatever floats your boat. The last thing you need are regular old straight pins.

Sit yourself down with a good movie and start cutting strips of the flannel. For my project, I ended up with strips about 9-10 inches long and about 1-1.5 inches wide. Just play around with them until you get the size you need, then use that one as a template.

Grab a few straight pins and anchor the material to the ball. Two pins oughtta do it.

Wrap the material around tightly. Then take two more straight pins and anchor it down again. I tried to cover first set of pins with the material as I did this, so I didn't have pins hanging out all over the place by the end.

Now start again and wrap another strip of material cross-wise. Anchor it again with more pins.

You can probably see from my photo above that I eventually needed four strips of material per ball. This, of course, will vary depending on the size of the ball and the width of the material.

But when you're done, you have these cute little things that look kind of wintery without being all Christmasy.

I have mine sitting in a little bowl in my front room. Next Christmas I could see myself using these in my holiday decorating (adding hooks to make ornaments to hang on a little rustic-looking Christmas tree, for example?). Or I may just save them as something fun to take out when I am packing away all the nutcrackers. Either way, I love them!