Christmassing - Knitted Baubles

Hello again!
For the final piece of Christmassing this year, I made some knitted baubles. After finding this tutorial a while ago and pinning it for future reference, this was the year that I just HAD to make these :)

I had just given my leftover baubles to charity before deciding I was going to make these, so I had to come up with another plan. Enter the Tiger shop in Hammersmith for selling styrofoam balls for fairly cheap. On second thought, I could have just purchased some more baubles at the Poundstore but clearly my brain was not really functioning, LOL. So since I'm not using pre-made baubles, I thought I'd show you how I made these. 

Start off with styrofoam balls, wool, and some wire (I got these from the florist)

Bend the wire creating a loop on one end

Stick the wire through the styrofoam ball and bend the ends outwards on the other side, securing the wire.

Glue (I used MP but you can also use hot glue if you want) the end of the wool to the bauble and wrap the wool around the bauble as you would when you normally wind wool into a ball. Make sure you cover the bottom and the bits of wire fully but wrap around the loop.

When you have the look you want, cut off your wool and glue the end of it to the bauble to secure.

You can use any colour you want, the result should resemble this.

As these baubles were much larger than the ones made in the original tutorial, I couldn't use toothpicks or cocktail umbrellas for 'knitting needles', but I cut some large bamboo sticks to size. You know, the ones you use on the barbeque... I then had to go through my bead stash to find some beads that would fit the 'needle' and glued them on using MP again. I left them overnight to dry (with hot glue this would have been instantaneous, but I just didn't think about it)

The whole collection looked like this. All that remained was to match the knitting needles with the wool that I liked and add some thread to ensure the baubles can be hung in the tree.

Here are the pink ones, made for a friend who LOVES pink... She promised me some pics of these in her tree so I'll post those once I have them. My tree wasn't up yet, so a green top had to serve as background.

A yellow one...

A blue one with large beads...

A red one with funky beads...

And the multi-coloured one with large green beads. 

As these were all presents, I don't have any in my tree. I'm waiting for pics from the recipients though :) Sadly one of my friends was unable to meet me before Christmas so she won't be able to use hers until next year. But I hope she likes them anyway! :)

If I were to make these again, and they were so much fun I have a feeling I will, I think I'll be using actually baubles instead and stick more to the original tutorial as it looks a lot easier. But it was still a ton of fun and I just love the result!