how to make rag ball christmas ornaments | DIY

I could barely wait to write a tutorial about the ornaments I just made today. I’ve seen rag ball bowl fillers before, but I’ve never tried making one into an ornament until now.

I finally gave it a shot today, and I am so excited about how they turned out THATICANBARELYSTANDIT.

I think it’s because not only are they cute, but they were so easy, and they are a totally perfect way to use up your extra fabric that is otherwise possibly building up in baskets and shoe boxes and behind couch pillows, slowly and methodically taking over your house.

Here’s what I used to make mine:

• a 3″ smooth styrofoam ball
• fabric – I used a natural muslin fabric for one of my ornaments, and a linen for the other.
• craft glue or hot glue
• scissors
• U Pin (you can find these in the floral aisle at craft stores or even at Walmart)
• twine
• anything else you’d like to embellish them with…I’ve been on a button kick for the last few days, so I went with that.

At the end of your fabric, make several small cuts about an inch apart from each other. Cut into the side of the fabric that is going with the grain.

Now, tear the fabric the rest of the way into strips. You want about 8 strips, 11 or 12″ long.

Tearing it instead of cutting it will bunch up the fabric just a teeny  bit, and give you this awesome raw edge:

Now just glue a strip around the ball, cutting off any excess where the ends meet.

And then glue a second piece opposite the first:

Continue doing this until your ball is covered, except for your last strip. (And don’t worry about everything being just right…the beauty of this ornament is in the imperfections.) Before gluing on the last piece of fabric, create a loop with a piece of twine, and pin it down with the floral pin, so the loop is on one side, and the ends are on the other, like this:

Now glue down your last fabric strip, so that the ends cover the twine where it is pinned:

Then wrap the ends of the twine around the bottom of the loop once or twice, and tie a knot:

Originally this was all I was going to do. But I wanted to make them a little less “country” and a little more “shabby”, so I glued on a button…and I thought the metal would look awesome in contrast with the natural texture of the fabric. And it does!

And then I made a second one. This is dress apparel linen…how cool is that? I also added a pearl tipped pin and a shiny mirrored button.

You can almost see my horrible orange snoopy shirt in the reflection of that button. I should maybe think about using my dress apparel linen to make…apparel…instead of ornaments…maybe.

So what do you think of these?

Tagged as: Christmas crafts, Christmas ornaments, ornament crafts, ornament DIY, ornament ideas, ornaments to make