Tiddly-om-pom-pom

The Basic Grey Felt Pompoms in this month's kit-to-copy from Scrapbook Circle's Note To Self kit are beautiful but, not having any in my stash, I set out to find a way of counterfeiting them.

This tutorial from Sara at Craft Snob was the nearest I could find but wasn't that close to the BG original.  However with a couple of minor adaptations I have come up with what I think is a pretty close approximation for the pompoms in the kit.

For a 1½" (38mm) wide pompom you need a strip of felt measuring 3½" (9cm) long by ... well that depends!!

{I'm too lazy to get out my glue gun or my needle and thread, so I used sticky tape!  Ideally it should be nice and thin (⅛"/3mm), but if you don't have any, you can use "standard" (½"/1cm) tape instead, though it is more wasteful of the felt!}
The width of your strip of felt needs to be twice the width of your roll of double-sided tape plus 1" (2.5cm).  So with a narrow tape (⅛") the strip measures 1¼" and with a wider one (½") it measures 2".

1. Stick the tape along one long edge of the felt.  Fold it in half lengthways so that the long edges meet and a tube of sorts is formed.  Stick another strip of tape along the long edge (but don't remove the backing paper yet).

2. Make lots of  ½" (13mm) cuts into the folded side of the strip (stopping at the edge of the tape) - these will form the loopy bits of the pompom.  Mine are about ⅛" (3mm) wide.

3. For the coloured string I used the spare string from a parcel tag and coloured it with one of Child No.3 's Promarkers.  Embroidery thread would work too ... or thin yarn ...  My parcel tag string was 10" (26cm) long.

4. If you've used wider tape you can now trim your felt strip along the taped edge so that the tape strip is about ⅛" (3mm) deep.  This will help to reduce the height of the finished pom pom.

5. Stick the coloured string to the exposed tape in loops about 1" (2.5cm) in from one end of the felt strip.

6. Roll the felt strip up tightly, starting at the end with most string stuck to it.

7. Using some fast-drying liquid glue (Superglue, Diamond Glaze, Glossy Accents) stick the whole shebang to a small scrap of card and you're done!

These are super-quick to make - I decided I needed a smaller pompom than my kit samples for a page I was making at my crop on Saturday and it took maybe 2 minutes to make one with a 2" (5cm) strip of felt (though I didn't add the contrasting threads).

Some memories from my days as Girl Guide in the Swallow patrol
as told here.

Of course, I've used papers and card from my February Counterfeit Kit (with the addition of a MS deep lattice punch, a QK texture folder, Man Oh Man Sizzlit dies and some punched butterflies) and have based this on a vertically challenged version of my Just One Sketch sketch.  It also fits rather nicely with this week's UKScrappers' challenge and Julie Kirk's Month of Sunrays too :o)