Flannelboard: Ten Balls of Yarn

Here’s a flannel for an upcoming storytime on knitting. I first saw the rhyme on the Canton Public Library (MI)’s blog. I quickly realized that I need ALL the colors (!) so there are ten balls instead of five.

Ten Balls of Yarn
Ten balls of yarn, sitting in a bowl (10 fingers up)
One fell out and started to…. ROLL (roll arms)
It bounced on my foot and there it sits (point to foot)
How many balls are left to knit? (9 fingers up)
(Count down until all the balls of yarn are on the floor)
Credit: Canton Public Library (MI)

(TEMPLATE at the end of the post!)

Process

I found a simple ball of yarn graphic on Canva, and first just cut out the outline. I decided it looked way too boring so contemplated how to make it look more like yarn than just a blob. I felt a little overwhelmed thinking of cutting out all of the whitespace on the graphic – there are 11 skinny pieces for each ball, so that makes 110 total! Looking for another answer, I thought about using actual yarn glued down. It just didn’t look the way I wanted, used a lot of glue, and was difficult to do neatly.

So, I experimented cutting out the little pieces, and decided it was worth the effort (for me.) I really liked the way it looked and the option to put different shades of a color together for some visual interest. After a couple of tries, I found a method of taping and cutting the pieces that worked well and didn’t take too long. Tweezers and toothpicks are very handy tools for small pieces, especially during the gluing process!