Fur pom poms for purses and keychains are lovely and fun ways to dress up the things you use every day. Fur pom pom earrings are something soft and cute to wear and are a great use for scrap fur that you have laying around (these are made with leftovers from the fur handbag I made a while back!).
- Fur (scraps work well – you can make the poms whatever size works with your scraps)
- Thread – if sewing with real fur it is best to use thread designed to work with leather and fur
- Straight Edge Blade for cutting the fur (avoid scissors to prevent giving the fur a “haircut”)
- Earring Hooks
- Jump Rings
- Beads
- Bead Clamp
- Pliers
- Glue
- Sharpie/Marker
- Sewing Needles (for leather and beading)
Trim any scraps of skin from the back of the fur.
Cut the fur into the shapes you want by holding the fur away from a flat/cutting surface. Use a straight edge blade to make a few light cuts to work through the thickness of the skin to cut it. If you place the piece against a hard surface to cut the skin, it will trim and blunt cut the fur so avoid that if you want to maintain the look of the fur (faux or real).
If you are making 2 pom poms, having them close to the same size and shape will yield the best results. One of these pieces was used as a template and the other was marked for where needs to be trimmed to match.
These two pieces are the shoulders of the rabbit hide. The fur obscures the shape of the pieces so the illustration above shows the shape of the pieces when the fur is pulled back.
This is approximately the shape I was working with. The colors show the parts that were sewn together to create a tube with a closed bottom.
Sew the hide into a tube matching the long edges (in the illustration, these are the areas in blue). An over edge whip stitch works for this situation. Pull the fur down/away from the cut edge for sewing to minimize how much fur gets caught
I used the pointy extension to make a bottom for the tube created. In the illustration, this is shown in red and green. If your scraps don’t have a good way of doing this, you can close the bottom in the same way I close the top of the pom in the steps below.
The poms want to collapse in a bit so I grabbed some old unbleached cotton muslin to stuff them.
I cut small pieces of fabric and filled the space so the pom poms hold their shape.
To close the tops of the poms, I did a criss-cross stitching patten. I pulled the top closed by sewing opposite sides of the tube together. The illustration shows two purple dots and two orange dots, sew the purple to purple spots together then the orange to orange. Finish the thread when you are happy with how the top edge looks. I did a few more stitches in a similar pattern to get mine to sit just right.
Begin a new thread (or series of threads) to add your beads. I used the technique of knotting between each bead to string these beads. I liked the spaced out silver beads and they swing/hang very nicely with the knotted strands.
Use a bead clamp to secure the threads to the jump rings.
Thread the string of beads through the hole in the bead clamp. Tie a large knot.
Before pushing the clamp closed with pliers, put a little dot of glue in there for extra hold. I used E6000.
At this point you just need to link the bead clamp to the earring hook with a jump ring!