DIY Dryer Balls

Happy New Year and welcome to Day 8 of my 12 Days of Christmas projects. A number of years ago I was given homemade dryer balls by someone (she took apart an old wool sweater) and I really liked how they worked. Dryer balls cut down on drying time and made my laundry nice and soft. But the dryer balls she gave me started to come apart and unravel, so I did some online research on dryer balls.

With the start of a new year, I feel that it’s time to get back to routines and everyday life. With three sons, there is no shortage of laundry to do in my home.

DIY Dryer Balls

I came across this DIY website on how to make dryer balls. You can find it here. On this website, the dryer balls are felted. The ones I was given were just balls of yarn – they weren’t felted, so that’s what I needed to do.

In my yarn stash, I had some wool yarn. I wanted to add to what I had and make a few more. The website states that for large loads of laundry, you can use up to 6 dryer balls. I previously only had 3 and so I wanted to make 3 more. Because they were unravelling, I also wanted to add to them to make them larger. My yarn stash had a couple of 100% wool skeins, marked hand wash only. Apparently, the machine-washable wool doesn’t work.

I also read that roving wool felts easier. You can make entire dryer balls out of roving so I went to Michaels to look for roving yarn. Roving yarn is quite expensive – I only purchased one skein but used a coupon so it wasn’t full price. My idea was to make dryer walls using the wool yarn from my skein, but covering them with the roving so that the felting process would be easier.

Then I got a cheap pair of pantyhose from the dollar store and made a caterpillar.

The instructions say to wash the dryer balls with hot water and rinse with cold. I don’t typically use hot water for my laundry so I put them in by themselves with a couple of rags, but used a shorter cycle.

The end result was perfect! They felted over nicely and now they won’t unravel. I made quite a few. A few always seem to end up in the laundry basket so I tend not to have all of them in the dryer at the same time. I also made a few for a friend of mine.

This is not a cheap craft – the yarn is not cheap; thank goodness for those Michaels coupons. But I am really happy with how they turned out – they are exactly what I wanted.