Making upcycled burlap balls for our homemade tree

I saw this fabric ball idea on Pinterest and immediately thought it would be a great use for some of the torn burlap that I recently acquired for free. I found an awesome source for authentic coffee bean sacks, with printings on them from Columbia and beyond. But they were reused to package concrete structures and some of them were torn in spots. So I saved the good pieces for later projects (gifts to be sewn and shared soon) and started cutting up the leftovers into squares.

To make the upcycled burlap balls, first I cut stacks of burlap squares that were roughly 2-3″ by 2-3″ but not measured with any great certainty or preciseness. I bought styrofoam balls from the craft store and had the kids help me with the rest. We put the burlap on wooden skewers like you would tissue paper on the end of a pencil, dipped the end in glue and pushed it into the ball.

This task was a bit tricky for my five-year-old. But she enjoyed it anyway. To hang them on the tree I used one long narrow strip of scrap fabric, with both ends stuck into the ball using the same glue and skewer method.

Once you have the burlap cut, these go pretty quick. And viola, here you have it.

To recap our week of crafts so far, here are links to the other posts on our ornaments for our homemade Christmas tree. There was finger knitting garland, ornaments made from stencils, and candy canes from beads and pipe cleaners. Still to come is garland from felt and photos from tree stumps. Hopefully that will keep you stumped! Come back for more crafting soon.