DIY Wool Ear Warmer

Today I'll show you how to turn an old wool sweater into a cozy, feminine ear warmer (actually, you could easily make two or three from one sweater!). I've included instructions for how to make the flowers shown in the picture above, but this is the kind of project that you could easily change to suit your taste. 

Grab your sweater, felted and ready to go. Lop off an arm.

Cutting along the underarm seam, slice open the sleeve. Cut the now opened sleeve into two equalish pieces. Don't worry about perfection - we'll be doing a lot of trimming.

Square the top edges by cutting off the arm cap.

With the top edges pressed together, side by side rather than over-lapping, zig zag stitch the two pieces together. 

Now you should have a longish, rather misshapen piece of wool. Trim and shape the band until it roughly resembles an ear warmer, thicker through the middle and tapering to the ends. Mine was about 2 3/4" at the ends and 4.5" in the middle. Depending on how large your head and how thick your hair is, you may need to make it narrower in the middle. You want it to lie smoothly against your head and not leave an awkward overhang. 

To make a flower, cut a small square of wool. Mine were about 1.25".  Cut a small triangle from each side. No need for perfection - if the triangles are askew, the flowers kinda turn into pinwheels. 

Keep cutting! I used about 25.

Starting around the center seam (because we want to cover that unsightly thing up), stitch down your first flower. For some extra pizzaz, I sew my flowers with a sequin in the middle of each. 

Arrange and stitch down to your heart's desire. 

To finish, simply layer the ends on top of each other and sew them together. Depending how long your sweater arms were, you might need to trim them shorter. My sweater had pretty long arms so I cut off quite a bit. 

And there you have it! I'm really excited about this project. I wear my hair in a top knot pretty regularly, and this will keep my ears nice and toasty when I have carpool duty this winter. #teacherwoes

Come visit me at Wunderbar for more felted wool projects!