How to Make a Fabric Pom Pom Necklace – A DIY Tutorial

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Last month, I came across a tutorial for making fabric pom necklaces on Pinterest. I was immediately intrigued and decided that fishing opener weekend was the perfect time to try to make one myself. Matt was gone fishing and I was hanging out with my dad at home. After a quick trip to JoAnn Fabrics, I got started.

It was a gorgeous day and I was sitting out in the sun on the driveway, crafting. It’s quite difficult to photograph yourself crafting though, so I apologize for the lack of quality images for this post. Truly.

Here’s what you need to make a fabric pom necklace:

• Scissors
• 1 sheet of felt
• Enough fabric to make 5 sets of 8 1.5″ circles – so 40 1.5″ fabric circles.
• Hot glue gun and glue sticks
• Some type of necklace chain

I used yellow fabric and gray felt, because that’s what I had handy. However, I would recommend that you try to choose a felt color that is as close as possible to your fabric color. That way, it will blend in better. I also bought a really long necklace chain at JoAnn’s and then I cut a piece of that off with a wire cutter for my pom necklace chain. That way, I could make a couple more necklaces from that same long chain.

Start by cutting 5 felt squares about 1.5″ in diameter. These are the bases of your pom flowers. If you choose to cut the circles smaller or larger, that’s fine. However big you make the circles is how big your poms will end up being.

Next, cut 5 sets of 8 1.5″ [or however big you made your felt circles] fabric circles. They don’t need to be perfect circles. I folded my fabric so I was cutting 4 circles at a time, and I did that 10 times, giving me 5 piles of 8 circles.

To make each pom, you start by taking a fabric circle, and kind of crumpling it up so it’s like a cone with the point at the bottom. Then put a dab of glue in the center of your felt circle and stick the cone onto it. Repeat by crumpling another fabric circle into a cone and put another dab of glue next to the first one. You do this 8 times and you begin to fill in all the gaps, creating the pom! Again, there’s no exact science to it.

Another note here – I unknowingly chose a fabric that unravels like crazy. So every time I wear the necklace, little strands of yellow fabric come off and hang out all over my shirts. If possible, choose a fabric that doesn’t fray too badly. Otherwise, I believe there’s some type of glue or something you can get that prevents fraying.

You continue with the method above until you’ve made 5 poms!

Next, you are going to glue your chain to your poms. You take your chain and glue it to the underside of 2 poms – one on each end. Here’s what I did. I took the long chain from JoAnns, and tried to measure what length I needed so that I could slip it over my head. Then I cut that length off, so I had one long chain. I glued each end to a pom. This is the easiest way to do it. But if you happen to use too short of a chain, once your necklace is done, you might not be able to slip it over your head. So be careful to make sure you can slip it over your head if you make it this way, using one solid length of chain.

Another option would be to take a normal necklace with a clasp in the back. Then you would have to cut the necklace at the OPPOSITE end of the clasp, like where a pendant would be hanging if you were wearing it like normal. Then you’d glue each end of the part you just cut to a pom. This would give you a necklace with a clasp in back at the end, which would let you unhook and put it on or else slip it over your head if it fit.

Once you glue the 2 ends of your chain to 2 poms, you will take the remaining felt and lay your necklace out on it. [See 2nd photo above, but it will have the chain coming off the 2 end poms now.] The 2 poms with the chain glued to the underside form the 2 ends of the necklace. Once you lay it out how you want it, glue the poms down onto the remaining felt and let dry. Once it’s dry, trim off all excess and viola! You have your pom necklace!