Halloween Craft: Caramel Apple Yarn Balls

Way back when I first made my Halloween trees, I wanted to do some kind of caramel apple inspired ornament. That resulted in one of my favorite craft fails of all time, and the idea was filed away in the back of my brain. It’s been percolating away for years and I’ve finally cracked it.

These little yarn covered “caramel apples” are so simple to make it’s great for kids who want to help make a Halloween present for their teacher, or just if you need to keep small hands busy while you’re working on anything else. Who cares if the yarn isn’t neat? Caramel doesn’t exactly stay where you put it either.

Take any size styrofoam ball you want, and cut off a wedge to make a flat side. This is just so that it can stand up if you want it to. I used a bunch of different sizes of balls to make an interesting looking grouping, but I wish I’d gotten even more extreme in my choices.

Cut a square of green felt big enough to come about halfway up the ball. Use silk pins – those metal pins with flat heads – to pin the felt in place. You will need to push and pull a little to get it to not wrinkle. Flat objects going over round objects can be a bit complicated. Just keep pinning and you’ll get there.

Use another pin, this time with a ball head, and push it through the center of the bottom. This makes your “blossom” for the apple.

Push a popsicle stick through the other end. Dip the end in a little glue before you shove it into the styrofoam and it will stay there for good. Then start wrapping your caramel colored yarn all the way around it using pins as necessary to keep it in place until it dries.

Keep wrapping all the way around. Once you get to the bottom half and the ball begins to curve down, the yarn doesn’t want to stay where you put it. Keep using pins to hold the yarn until it dries.

So if these were real caramel apples, the exposed apple part would have to be at the top by the stick and the caramel would be covering the bottom. Because you dip the apples into the caramel that way. But I decided to flip it because it was easier to deal with the felt that way, it was easier to deal with the yarn that way, and I figured that you’d still get the idea. In this made up world the caramel is apparently poured over the apples. If accuracy really matters to you, then you’ll have to work harder to get the felt to lie flat, cut a slit in the felt to fit the stick through, and try to coil the yarn on the flat surface and over the edge of that, and all that must mean that you really really care about how your caramel apples are caramelled. But hey, there are things I really really care about too. No judgment.

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