Needle Felt Yarn Ends for a Seamless Join

One fun way to get rid of little bits of yarn and to work with them a little more easily in a project is to make a crazy ball or a magic ball of yarn.

These are balls of yarn made with little oddments that are joined to each other so that you can just keep on knitting and not have to think about where to change colors.

Joining the yarns together is usually done by just tying them together, or, if you want to be a little fancier, doing a Russian join to more seamlessly join two yarns together.

Diana at Closet Crafter has another idea that works for magic balls or any other time you want to join two pieces of yarn together without having an end to weave in: needle felting.

A needle felting tool has a bunch of needles on it that you punch into the fibers, which eventually melds them together. It’s sort of the manual version of the felted join, but it works on acrylics and blends as well (but not cotton, Diana reports).

Have you ever made a magic or crazy ball of yarn? I’d love to hear about it and what you used it for.

[Photo via Closet Crafter.]

Next Pattern:

I can’t resist a pattern that’s both useful and a little silly, and that’s exactly how I feel about the Rybka pouch pattern from the delightfully named Rat and Sea Witch.

I know you’re going to ask, because I did, too. Rybka means little fish in Polish. (And because you’re also probably going to ask, Rat and Sea Witch comes from people’s attempts to say the designer’s name, Ratasiewicz, which if you say it fast kind of sounds like rat and sea witch.)

It’s easy to make a little fish bag in different sizes to suit your needs. The pattern has specific instructions for an Airpods Pro case and a pencil case, but you could change the length easily to hold more stuff, and change the size in general by working with a different weight of yarn.

The pattern calls for sock yarn and mohair held together to make a fingering weight gauge, but you could try it with heavier yarn and see what size bag you end up with.

Whatever size you make it, this looks like a fun project for holding trinkets or everyday items. The mouth of the fish is the mouth of the bag, and it closes with a drawstring that is also the strap. I wonder, too, if you could make one of these with a small clasp frame that could be the fish’s mouth and then you could just work I cord straps that would attach to the sides of the fish.

I could also see stripes, or fish of different colors to use up your yarn leftovers. How about a sunglasses case with a little loop to attach to your bag? Once you start thinking about all the ways you could use a fish-shaped bag in your life, I think you’ll see that you probably need more than one.

If you make one of these I would love to know how it went!

You can grab a copy of the pattern on Ravelry.

[Photo: Rat and Sea Witch]

Next Pattern:

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