Materials Required:—

Two used postcards or pieces of thin cardboard, a strong darning needle, odd pieces of bright-colored wools, scissors.

A very much better way to make a woollen ball, but more difficult, is shown in Figures 3 and 4. Here you must first have a piece of fairly stiff cardboard and on it lay a teacup or tumbler with the rim on the cardboard. Draw with a pencil, or scratch with the scissors round the rim so that you have a circle about three and a half or four inches across on it, and cut these circles out. Then take some smaller circular thing, a quarter, or something about that size, and place it carefully in the center of each of your larger circles, and cut out the smaller circle like a hole in the middle of the bigger one. Now take some wool—you can have it of many bright colors, and if you have any old woollen knitted things which you do not need you can unravel them. Slip one end of your wool through the hole of both pieces of cardboard when they are laid together, tie it in a knot, and with your fingers at first, and later with a darning needle, keep winding the wool through the hole and over and over the cardboard until it is all covered. Go on winding it through the hole, until the hole is so full that even your needle will not push through. Then you must take sharp scissors and carefully cut the wool at the outer edge of this round cushion you have wound, till the scissors cut into the cardboard, so that you can slip one point between the two cards and cut right round the circle. You must be careful not to let the wool be pulled out of the hole through which you have threaded it. Now take a piece of thin strong string, slip it round between the two cardboard circles, wind it two or three times, and tie it very tightly. Next, carefully tear away your two cardboard rounds and you will have a fine firm ball, which only needs cutting and trimming with the scissors into an even shape. You can make this ball look very pretty by arranging your wool as you wind it into different layers of varying color or make a quarter of your circle of one color and the next quarter of another, and so on. Small balls made like this make pretty pompoms for shoes and hats, and tassels on bags, or they can be fixed on drawstrings in underclothing, to prevent them coming out.