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Saturday and Sunday are typically laundry days in our house. And with the three kids, there is never a shortage of laundry.
I may catch up by the time the evening is done (I will confess I don’t mean folded and put away!), but by tomorrow morning, the pile will grow again.
That being said, I have been playing around with the beautiful yarn I picked up in Prince Edward Island (you can read about that in my “Three Kids and a Puppy” blog posts), and after reading the article on DIY dryer Balls by Petals to Picots, I was inspired.
Dryer balls are great! They are reusable, help reduce the amount of chemicals in our home, are %100 natural, help speed up dryer times and more!
So I decided I would try her most simple method using wool yarn. Going to my PEI stash I found the perfect one.
Her instructions are simple – feel free to head over to her blog to fill in the details (www.petalstopicots.com) – take your yarn (not superwash wool!), wind it up in a ball about the size of a tennis ball and throw it into the wash a few times with your laundry!
I selected my Fleece and Harmony wool, began winding ending up with two good size balls.
After winding the balls of yarn it’s important to secure the end of the yarn. I did so by taking a yarn needle and threading the yarn through the ball several times, and knotting the end of the yarn in several places.
Then came the fun part (adding a bit of excitement to my weekend laundry routine)! I threw them in the wash and waited. After the first wash they came out like this:
You can see they are a bit more fuzzy and shrunk a bit. Now I’ve since put them through one more load and will confess they weren’t as felted as I would have hoped. So as we speak they are happily spinning through a third and we shall see how they turn out!
Have you tried to make your own felted dryer balls? Feel free to comment below sharing your own story. I look forward to sharing the rest of mine (hopefully with a happy ending) soon!
Just thought I’d offer that when we make ours, we enclose them in pantyhose, wash them alone with some extra soap (soap aids in felting) and do it on a really hot cycle (not the usual regular laundry temp), and we then throw them in the dryer, also on extra hot. I wonder if that will make a difference! Fingers crossed for you!
Thanks! I will try it! Threw them in the fifth load but still don’t feel like they are super felty! Will definitely try the pantyhose 🙂