Pom-pom day

The school holidays are upon us, and time is scarce for bloggage but I've managed to sneak away a couple of hours here and there to go and read the linen cat blog. It's one of my new faves to read, and so I've back read some of her old posts (what a nerd I am). Beth sews cute little animals out of tweed and fabulously printed cottons, she's even a good Northern lass to boot!

To help the holidays along, I thought I could introduce my 5yr old to some crafting techniques that we could do together other than the normal pens, paints, play-doh kind of thing. So I decided to show her how to make a pom-pom.
I have strong memories of making these when I was little, glueing bits onto them to make them into chicks, bunnies etc. I even made a red, white and blue one which ended up on our school's card that was sent to Prince Charles and Princess Diana when Prince William was born! (My mum still has the newspaper cutting somewhere) I like to think that as a baby he played with the said pom-pom in his crib, ha!

Anyway, we started off strong. Rube's was enjoying the prospect of making something out of wool. She was intrigued by the circle cutting, but by the third piece of yarn wrapping it was passed back to me for my turn to do some wrapping - and my turn ended up continuing until it was finished. Nell, the 18mnth old, was at this point like a kitten with the ball of wool - she had it wrapped all over her from head to toe. Creating a look not disimilar to a Christmas tree.
I regained Rube's interest momentarily, when it came to cutting the edges, but then as soon as it was finished she was off - being a kitten herself with the newly made pom-pom.

I think I must have enjoyed myself too much, as that evening I carried on making more pom-poms until I'd run out of the red wool. My hubster was amazingly interested in it too, as he'd never known how to make one either! He just couldn't get how it went from a hard-ish, flat-ish, wool-wrapped-round-cardboard thing to a round soft ball type thing in just a matter of minutes.
He grew up as one of three boys, so I guess they didn't do things like this when they were little. I like to think that if I had a boy, I would still show him the same craft things that I'll show my girls.

I'm thinking of doing soap making or candle making with Rube's next week, does anyone have any better ideas of what I could try out on her?