Temari Balls Workshop with Nicola Davis

These are Nicola's examples of Temari Balls- they were beautiful.

We had a brilliant workshop on Saturday with Nicola Davis of The Twisted Thread. I think most of us had never heard of Temari Balls before the workshop. Nicola explained a little about their history to start.

Temari has origins in China and then spread across Japan. A long time ago Japanese ladies would use waste strips from kimono making to make balls and children used them in games. This would have started with ladies from upper class backgrounds as the fabrics were very expensive. In the 19th century when cotton became available, more people started making them but eventually this went out of fashion as the use of rubber for making balls became popular. The craft has become more popular in recent times and temari ball making is part of Japanese culture and heritage. As such we should respect the Japanese tradition when we make temari balls.

We (there were 14 of us in the workshop) started with a polystyrene ball which Nicola had already completely wrapped with wool. We then wrapped it with polyester thread, so that the ball was completely covered. This had to be random wrapping and at first it seemed that it would never be completely covered. However we all managed it reasonably quickly. We chose our own colours which was quite time consuming! We then had to do a bit of measuring using a strip of paper so we could divide the ball into sections - imagine an orange. The top and bottom were the North and South Poles and we added an equator, all marked with gold thread which we sewed onto the ball with a temari needle which was long and bendy. Here we are constructing our balls using pins as markers. We made a star pattern. Perle cotton (number 8 I think) was used for the stars and again we all took time to choose our favourite colours. The pattern looked very complicated at first but Nicola was an excellent teacher and soon had us all sewing the design correctly. I made mistakes, but mostly managed to unpick them.

Some of our members went home and ordered more polystyrene balls to continue making them. If I ever make another one I will use rice hulls stuffed into the foot of an old pair of tights and only natural fibres as thus would be more sustainable. I will use mine to hang in my Christmas tree. Here are some of our nearly finished balls.

You can find Nicola's online workshops here: http://thetwistedthread.co.uk/
Here is her website:                                        thetwistedthread.co.uk 
​This is email address:                                     [email protected]

And finally here is Tosca the puppy waiting patiently for her walk! 
​Thank you Nicola for a great day.