Materials Required:—

A small strip of thick cardboard, a small piece of string, wool, scissors.

This is the easiest of all the things one can make in wool. Take a narrow piece of stiff cardboard, or a flat stick about five inches long and about one inch wide, and make a slit at each end: between these two slits stretch a piece of thin string and then, about the middle of the strip of cardboard, wind the wool over and over till it is like a ball. Do not allow the wool to spread too far along the cardboard. When the ball of wool is two, or two and a half inches in diameter, loosen the string from the slits, and slip out the cardboard carefully from the ball; you will not have a bundle of wool with a string running through all the loops. Tie the string up tightly and knot it well, then take your scissors and cut the loops as in Figure 2. After all the loops are cut you will have to clip all the loose ends, till they are about even in length, and the bundle will now be a nice regular shape. This is a somewhat wasteful way of making a ball, and should only be used by very little children with waste wool or cotton yarn. It teaches them, however, a very useful thing—to wind wool evenly, and to cut and trim it.