Patriotic Trash to Treasure

I so hope everyone is in a patriotic mood because I am on a roll!  I made this fabric ball in less than 30 minutes out of something I had in my hand and was about to throw in the trash!

This is the first fabric ball I've ever made and I sure hadn't planned on it.  I was getting ready to create another project and it required straight pins.  Now I had received a brand new handmade pin cushion from my friend Loy in the Package Pal Exchange and I decided now was the time to use it.  So I got out my old pin cushion and transferred the pins to my new cushion.

Isn't that cute green pin cushion much better than that old tomato one left-over from high school home-ec class???!!!  So after I got all of the pins out of it I was just about to put it in the trash when, well you guys are crafters, so you know........I asked myself "Can I make a craft out of this?"  I turned it over in my hand a couple of times and it hit me.....it's a great base for a fabric ball!  Sooooooo...
I went to my fabric drawer to see what kind of red, white and blue fabric I might have and look what I found:

I bought this fabric at least 13 years ago from Ben Franklin's in Montana.  (I don't even remember what I bought it for, but I never used any of it!)  I made some 1" snips in each piece and ripped them into strips.  This was super fast, maybe took me 4 or 5 minutes to do all of these:

Now I already know that I have way more than I need for this little ball, but I also have another project in mind that uses fabric strips so I made extra.  Now all I had to do was grab my ball, wrap a strip around it it, pin it with a straight pin and cut off the excess.  This took all of like 5 minutes.

Now all I needed was something to finish off the top.  I went to my old stash of fabric stars.  I just used some of these on my wreath I showed you the other day.  They are just made from fabric that I covered with mod podge and then cut out.  You can read about this technique HERE.

Now of course, you probably don't have a stash of stars, but you could use anything really, a button, a bead, a circle of  fabric or felt.  But I used a star and a bead and fastened it with a straight pin.

Didn't that turn out just too cute?  I have to say that like my wreath, because it's all pinned and no glue, I can take it apart in about 1 minute and use that ugly tomato pin cushion for another seasonal fabric ball.  I'm thinking Halloween would be fun or maybe Christmas.  I'm so glad I didn't throw it in the trash.  It's perfect sitting on top of that old electrical insulator up on my fantel with my patriotic wreath and that other thing I made today...which I'll show you tomorrow.

Now if I could just stop whistling Yankee Doodle Dandy........

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