Making Pompom animals

In the midst of winter gloom and post-Christmas, my thoughts turn to spring and to the next holiday, which is Easter. My family often come to me for lunch on Easter Sunday and there are gifts and an Easter Egg Hunt for the children. This year I am planning to revive a childhood craft skill, inspired by Project 77 and Lillie London Lesson on creating wool toys for children in 'Lillie London’s Needlework Book'. When I was at primary school there was a craze for making wool pompoms by winding odd bits of multi-coloured wool around cardboard circles. It was a fad that was probably inspired by the children’s TV programme Blue Peter (I think Lesley Judd made Flumps using pompoms) and we spent hours winding wool and experimenting with different effects by tying in a variety of colours at intervals during the wind.

I was therefore both amused and pleased to find that Lillie London had included a project in her book to create chicks and bunnies for children using these wool pompoms. It hadn’t occurred to me as a child to trim the pompoms into different shapes and use different sizes of pompom together to create animals. However, it looks simple and it will be fun to use up odds and ends of wool to create Easter chicks and bunnies. Pompoms also make great Christmas decorations and, as I discovered as a child, making pompoms can become quite addictive and competitive.