Crochet Balls

Last week I was struck with the urge to crochet some balls. I'm sure that sounds strange but I was finished with the baby hexie blanket (reveal to come shortly - it's being blocked at the moment) and wasn't sure what to do next. I wanted to make something fairly quick and easy but it had to be fun as well. I must have seen mention of crochet balls around the web before but I couldn't remember where so I did a search and came up with this tutorial at Greedy for Colour.

It's pretty straight forward and I managed to make my first ball during baby's naptime and another later that night. I used a multi-coloured yarn and stuffed them with Hobby Fill (bought at Spotlight ages ago for around $6 for a big bag).

I then decided to buy some little bells to put inside balls so they would jingle when baby played with them. I dashed off to Spotlight on Saturday morning and got a bag of 50 small bells for $6. I made another ball using some light blue yarn I had leftover from the hexie blanket and added a bell at the time of stuffing. Baby is quite taken with them. He is definitely going through a ball phase (perhaps as a boy he will never grow out of it?!) and I like that these are soft and can't do any damage if he throws them around.

I also made an extra one for our Operation Christmas Child shoebox.

Just a couple of notes:

• Perhaps it's the strange way I crochet but the first two (multi-colour)balls are actually inside out! When I get to the 5 rows of the same number of stitches I have to turn my work inside out for the nice lines to show (as you can see on the blue ball)
• if you can't count or give the stitch counting your full attention it might be wise to use stitch markers. I didn't but I'm convinced I did drop a stitch here and there
• The smaller multi-coloured ball was made using a 2.5mm hook and the other 2 were made using a 4mm hook.

Now I'm wondering what else I can crochet balls for! I am thinking about incorporating it into my ornament swapping...maybe...but I cannot confirm or deny at this stage :-)