Wool Pumpkins

I am having a love affair with wool right now.  Actually, it's been going on for the last few months.  I am knitting a poncho for my girl and getting ready to wet felt some acorns.  Up until now, I've always been afraid to use it or experiment with.  I must say that when I dyed my first pot of raw wool, I was worried it wouldn't work out but it did!

This post is about wool felted pumpkins that I made in August!  Yes, August. I must be crazy, right?  I know my husband was thinking that: "Pumpkins already?!" he said.  I told him I have been wanting these pumpkins forever for my math shelf and that I could not justify buying them as it was too expensive.  In the end, I really don't know what it cost me to make these as I was already sitting on the wool.  My best guess is about ten dollars for the wool.

I made tiny wool balls from some yarn I had and then rolled them up in the raw wool.  I had to lay out a few layers of the raw wool and then roll up the yarn ball in the wool.  Next, I stuffed the yarn and  wool balls into panty hose and tied each one off.  As you can see from the next picture, I made them in different sizes.

When you get the wool into the hose and are ready to dye it, just put it into a pot of coloured water with a bit of vinegar.  Boil until the water is clear.  When that is done, take the wool balls that are still in the panty hose and throw them into your washing machine.  I have a front loader, so I needed to add a towel and a bit of laundry soap.  I just ran my machine through a regular washing cycle in hot water.

When it was done, I cut the coloured wool balls carefully out of the panty hose.  So, there you have it, perfect orange wool balls ready to be turned into pumpkins.

The last thing I did was use embroidery thread to wrap around my pumpkins to make the lines and give them definition.  I used my sewing needle to go into the middle and just wrapped my way around the pumpkin -- in and out, in and out, etc.  After the pumpkin shape was finished, I added some tiny green stems.  The green wool was in my stash already from a project last Christmas.  I ended up making forty five because I wanted enough to count from zero through to nine.  Crazy I know, but I sooooooo needed that crafty break from those classroom reno's at the time.  I can hardly wait to get them out on our shelf this week.