Yarn ball tutorial - sort of

When I showed you the Snowball string of lights I did not have any tutorial on how to make the balls since I had made them pre-blogging. Now I made new ones, just not snowballs, but Easter eggs. I picked up from a local decorating magazine Avotakka a recipe for making the yarn balls. I had previously used wallpaper paste to make the balls but in the magazine there was new paste idea that I wanted to try, it was sugar paste.

I filled some water balloon with air and tryed to form them to seem more like eggs. In the Snowball version I tryed to form them to balls obviously.

The paste required equal amount of sugar and water in volume. I boiled the water first and mixed it with sugar like the instructions said, but the sugar didn't seem to dissolve totally so I microwaved it a bit too. Once the sugar had dissolved and I had made small bundles from wool yarn I dipped those indivually to the paste and then I rolled them over the water balloons.

That's when all the fun started, firstly the yarn got strangled many times, eventhough I tried to be carefull. Then the paste was so sticky that it was very hard to use. When I tried to take a piece of yarn to tie the balloon to dry I was stuck with all the pre-cut tie yarns. I hated that paste. In the end I had the paste all over the place. I wanted to take pictures of the process but my hands were so sticky.

Here are all of the balloons drying, which actually took some time. Even on the next day they were not fully dry. I cannot remember having that same problem with the wallpaper paste. I might remember all wrong but I think those were dry in a matter of hours.

Also when I did the Snowballs I first rolled the yarn over the balloon and afterwards dipped it into the paste, then I wiped the excess paste off. That way I got exactly the amount of yarn I wanted on the balloon and I did not have to quess how much is good. Also even when the yarn eggs were dry they look wet and I don't like that look. They still look icky to me.

Maybe this sugas paste thing is good if you want to make these with kids, since there is no harm eating some of the paste, but next time I will stick to the wallpaper paste. But in the end I did get some yarn eggs, which is cool.

Have a nice Easter and hope you have a Good Friday!

PS. We have national holiday on Friday and Monday. No work, Yay! How about you? And by the way in Finland the Good Friday is called Long Friday.