I’m super excited to bring you our very first video tutorial! I get a little nervous in front of a camera, but it actually turned out to be great fun and I’m pretty pleased with the result. I can’t remember where I learned how to make these fluffy pom-poms but I’m almost positive it was an old episode of Martha Stewart. Of course, mine will never be as perfect and high-quality as hers, but they’re fun to make regardless and there’s lots of room for experimentation! I’ve made them for all sorts of decorations and occasions, but I think my favorite way to use them is for winter-themed crafts. These look great tied onto the ends of a scarf or you could even make a whole bunch as a nice tree garland!

I made a giant one out of our Kaleidoscopic yarn for the purposes of this video, so I jabbed a bobby pin through it and it turned into a nice little hair accessory.

(I promise it’s a coincidence that my shirt matches the pom-pom!)

Here’s the step-by-step for a decorative pom-pom.

1. Take a piece of cardboard and cut it into a rectangle. The smaller your cardboard piece is, the smaller and fluffier your pom-pom will be! The one I’m making here is GIANT so you can see what I’m doing, but I think the ideal size would be about half this. Make a cut on both short sides and stick your string through, stretching it lengthwise along the cardboard piece and leaving a long piece on the end. You’ll use this to tie it together later.

2.  Flip it over and start winding your yarn around the short side of the cardboard. The more you wind, the fluffier it will be! I think I wound mine about 100-150 times but I could definitely have done more to increase the volume, especially for the size that I made. I liked the effect that I got using the Kaleidoscopic yarn for this because of the color gradient, so you get a few different colors in one puffball!

3. Slide the whole mess off of your cardboard, making sure to untuck the string from the slits that we cut in step 1.

4. Tie the two ends (the ones that were tucked in the cardboard slits) together very tightly. As you pull, the yarn makes a sort of little round disc shape. Knot the two ends together a few times for security and leave the ends long if you’re planning to tie the pom-pom onto anything.

5. Stick your scissors into the middle of the loops so that you’re cutting each loop in half. Make sure to get all of them!

6. You’ll get a big, fluffy mess of a pom-pom! Give it a haircut so that it looks a little more lively and even. This is about where I realized that I should have wound up some more yarn around the cardboard so I would have had more volume! Oh well.

To make it into a hairpin, I seriously just stuck a long bobby pin through the middle of the pom-pom. Super easy! I bet you could try to hot glue it to a sturdier, wider hair pin if you want a nice and neat hair accessory for a gift.

Hope you guys enjoyed this tutorial! We have a bunch of other really cool craft tutorials in the works for our YouTube channel that I’m really excited to share with you. See you soon!