Red Wool Pin Cushions

     I do not have any red sewing accessories on the table that I keep my active sewing machine on.  It is time to add some red color to my sewing area.  I made a couple of felted wool pin cushions for myself with some wool yarn I purchased just for this project.  I love making these little wool pin cushions.  They are so much fun to make, so simple and so useful.

     This is a short written tutorial on how I made them.  I use 100% wool yarn.  I bought two skeins of KnitPicks.com's Wool of the Andes worsted yarn a couple of weeks ago.  One skein in red and another in cranberry.  This yarn is lovely to knit with.  I've made a few scarves with it, but it's really great for felting.  The bulky variety of Wool of the Andes is also fun to work with.  I was able to make two pin cushions from each of the skeins I bought.

      I wind the yarn into a flat ball.  I couldn't tell how much yarn I had used each time, so I just guessed when I thought I had used half of the skein for the first ball of each skein.  I thread the end of the yarn into a long steel needle and weave into the center of the ball several time to make a little dimple and then I weave the end in the ball of yarn to secure it.  To keep this all together while I'm felting it, I place the balls in a knee high stocking secured with a knot very close to the ball.  I can fit four or five of these small wool balls into a knee high.  You can also use a sock to the do this, but I prefer to use a knee high because I can see through the stocking and I can see if the wool is felted enough.  I wet the knee high and the wool balls thoroughly in the sink with hot water, you can also put them in with a load of wash.  Soap is supposed to help with the felting process, but I usually just rely on water and the heat from the dryer.  Then I dry them in the dryer with a couple of wet bath towels or a load of wash.  The heat and the friction help the wool to felt.  I usually run them through the dryer several times until I like the way they have felted.  In this project, the red wool felted much better than the cranberry wool.  Interesting.