Making felt garlands

I have found the coolest craft for my kids’ rooms. Heck, I’m so in love with making felt garlands that I’ve got one on my mantle for Fall!!

I bought a felt garland kit from for Patrick’s room. He’s got a green dinosaur theme going on, and I was thrilled when the colors in the kit matched his bedding perfectly. His kit came in a mason jar complete with a needle and colored bakers twine.

If you live in the Bay Area, I urge you to check out The Makery. It’s in downtown Los Altos and it’s like Pinterest and your favorite craft store had a baby. It’s difficult to leave with ONLY a few items. If you don’t live nearby, you can purchase the kits here. For scale, Patrick’s kit was a small jar. I’d recommend ordering the larger one cause these garlands are more fun the longer they are!

Here is the finished product:

I really wanted to take home the rainbow kit, but felt (ha, pun intended) that it was missing a few colors – like her favorite, pink!! No worries, you can buy any amount of felt you’d like and there’s seriously every color of the rainbow. That’s right – giant apothecary jars full of felt balls. Creative juices are a’flowin!!

I was thinking about doing a giant rainbow but with the light and dark colors along with white, it didn’t look quite right. I did a random pattern and I. AM. IN. LOVE.

The final garland I made was just something I thought of in my head for Fall and I have 3 other ideas for great color combinations for the same season! I chose brown, red, bright orange, orange, and yellow for a great Fall “rainbow” if you will. This one’s going up on my mantle.

I also think it would be fun for Fall to do a garland in just candy corn colors, or purple/teal/black, or different shades of browns/oranges. Endless possibilities – and I love my holidays and celebrations!!

Felt garland tutorial

I feel like I’m cheating you out of a real “how-to” since I didn’t make the felt balls myself. Also, I’ve never knitted or sewed before so I’m not sure I’m even doing anything correctly. I’ll give you the run down of what I’ve done for these garlands.

I used bakers twine (Fall garland used divine twine) for backbone of this craft. Plus and minus for this. Plus is you can pick any color to accent the felt balls (I had orange and black for my Fall one!!) but a minus is that the twine was 4 different strings which once in a while moved a bit while pushing the felt on. Nothing horrible here, but you may have to tweak it a bit if you’re a perfectionist. I may try nylon next time, who knows.

Lay out your balls (ha!) in the pattern that you want.

Thread your needle through the twine and start stringing the balls through one at a time. I made sure to go directly through the middle, and push all the way to the end of the string. I did not knot the string after each ball, but did knot the ends once I was done. There were one or two that I didn’t push the needle through and had to use my back teeth but I should have used pliers to get the needle out.

As I threaded each ball, I tried to keep the spacing about even. Once I was done, I made some adjustments to make sure the spacing looked perfect. They’ll move wherever you want, but won’t slide on the twine.

Have you worked with felt before? Any pro-tips to share with this first timer?