Pom pom rug tutorial

We had a lot of wet weather recently, which forced me indoors with nothing much to do, so I did what most people would naturally do on a rainy afternoon and I made a pom pom rug.
Here it is:

A lot of beautiful ladies from my lovely town have asked for a tutorial, so to the ladies of Ulladulla, this tutorial is just for you.

First thing you need to do is make a TON of pom poms. This might seem daunting but I found a really quick and easy way to make pom poms of any size with nothing more than some wool, your own hand and a pair of scissors. The gal in THIS VIDEO shows you how to make them the same way I made them for this rug.
Get yourself settled in front of a good movie, because once you get the hang of it you will need some entertainment to get you through the next 200 pom poms.

In case you want extra photos, I will show you some photos of me making your basic Pom pom. Excuse the paint all over my hands, I was painting all day.

1. Wrap wool around your fingers like so.
For large pom poms, wrap wool around 4 fingers. For medium, wrap around 3, for small, wrap around 2. The more times you wind the wool around your fingers, the fuller and thicker and fluffier the pom pom will be in end.

2.

Get a length of wool, approx 20cm long. thread it through the middle of your fingers as I have in the photo above. Wrap the wool-length up and over the wool so both pieces of wool are then on the same side of your hand and tie it gently and slip wool off your fingers. Once wool is off your fingers pull the knot as tightly as you can and tie it off. It should now look like this:

4.

Now you can cut the loops. Be careful not to cut the two lengths of wool you used to tie up the bunch as you will use those bits to tie it onto the mat later.

5. Once you have cut all the loops, its going to look pretty ratty like so:

6. Time to give that sneaky little pom pom a hair cut.

When you have trimmed all the ratty bits of wool up, you should have a nice, round, even pom pom like so:

7. Now make more pom poms. Some large, some small, some red, some yellow:

8. Now make like, 100-gagiollion more. (not really, but you will need about 150)

Now that you are sitting in a living room full of pom poms and your right eye is twitching from insanity, its time to assemble the rug. Go to a hardware or homewares store and buy a door mat like this one:

9. Now you start tying the pom poms onto the mat by simply threading those long bits of wool you have left over on the pom poms from when you tied it off, through the mat and knotting it onto the other side like so:

Mix up the colours, put big ones next to small ones next to medium ones. Tie them nice and closely together so you get a good, thick cover. Keep tying them all on until you have covered the whole mat in pom poms.

Flip the mat over and you should have something that looks a little bit like this:

Enjoy your new pom pom rug,
Love from Vanessa