Tuesday, September 11, 2012

DIY Tissue Pom Poms

Okay, so I didn't get great pictures towards the end. I had 20 of them to make, and had people helping me make them, sooooo, here are the pictures I did get. It's super easy. When looking up how to make these online, like on this site, it calls for 20 x 30 tissue sheets, but those aren't really readily available at the stores. Well they might be, but at the cheaper stores, like the Dollar Store or Big Lots they come in 20 x 20, and trust me, you can make them with this size too. So I started off with tissue paper, some good sharp scissors and some wire, mine was white but you can use anything.


First unfold the tissue, the best pom poms have more tissue (the tutorial calls for 10 sheets), but I did one with just 10 sheets and that worked too, but since I only had 20 x 20 sheets, it was a little on the light side, and "airy", with 15 sheets, it had the more full affect, I think some of mine had 16 or 17 (yep I can't count, those suckers are thin and hard to separate)

Then you need to accordion fold it

Continue the accordion or "fan folding"


When you're done, you'll have something that looks like this. The folds don't have to be totally perfect.

Then you need to wrap the wire around the middle. Like so:

I added a little loop in there, so that I had a good place to add the string so I can hang them easily. You'll thank me later for this part. Make sure you make the loop is on the flat part, if you put the loop anywhere else, like on the the side where the folds are, it won't work, I tried that, and the pom pom didn't "fluff" right when hung.

Next, if you want to make the edges rounded, or pointy, this is when you cut. I wanted rounded for mine, but the same application can be used for the pointy, etc. The tutorial shows them cutting it all at once, I found this REALLY hard, so I did it phases. As you can see below I took about half the stack and cut my rounded edge.

Then took the second half and matched it, I found this much easier, and nicer on my fingers and my scissors.

In the tutorial it's this nice pile, this is what my pile looked like, don't worry, it's slightly messy, I think they stage stuff in those pictures to make it look easier then it really is, just to make people feel bad when ours doesn't come out the same. Join me in a messy pile!

When you're done, it should look something like this:

I added a string at this point, I tried doing it after, but it didn't work out as well, and the string really doesn't get in the way.


Now here comes the long part. Spread out your "fan" and then one by one start separating the tissues from each other. When you're separating the tissues, if you try to separate as close to the middle as possible. If that makes sense.

See how my model (aka, best friend who's shower I'm throwing and I'm making her work), starts her separation from the center? The more separation you can get from each sheet, the fluffier your pom pom is going to be. So you're going to "fluff" half of the stack up, then flip over the stack and fluff the other half in the other direction.

Looking at the picture below, she's fluffing alternating sides. She's fluffed the right side, and is now fluffing the left side. You can either separate from the left, then the right and switch back and forth (I found that this worked better), but you can also separate the sheets from one side, then the other side, then flip the whole thing around...

This is just part of the stack being fluffed, maybe 3 or 4 more sheets and we're going to flip the stack the other way and do the same thing to the other side.

After you fluffed both sides, you just need to move the tissue around so it looks seemless. Sorry I don't have a picture of this part. But you'll get it, and if you tear some of the layers, don't worry, you won't be able to see it. These are all the pom poms we made that night. You can tell they don't look "perfect" but just wait till you see them hung (post coming tomorrow). Until then...happy Pom, Pom'ing'!

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