Patriotic Work Ball Tutorial

Tutorial for a Patriotic Ball decoration using a 12" Silver Pencil Work Ball, three colors of wide foil mesh and a string of RAZ battery LED lights. Just view the video and the written instructions will follow.

Lets get started!

First thing you will need is a 12" Work Ball. We have these in eleven colors. For this tutorial, we chose the silver metallic Work Ball.

The work ball comes folded flat. You just set it up and separate the sections (8 sections with 4 twists on each section) and it forms a round shape. There will be two small metal caps that come with the ball to secure the sections in place. If you receive your work ball with two wire pieces attached, just discard those because they just don't work very well to hold the ball in place and the solid metal caps that we will enclose works much better.

Place the metal cap over the top of the ball and position the sections in the grooves in the cap. Bend the metal down between the sections to secure them in place. Turn the ball over and do this to the bottom also. Smooth out the twists and get ready to decorate!

Next we used 10" Wide Foil Mesh in Red, White with Silver and Royal Blue.

These wide foils are very shiny and have a nice sparkle. The rolls are 10" in width and 10 yards in length. You will have some mesh left over from each roll, but it will take more than half to finish the Patriotic Ball.

We decorated the ball using the ruffle technique with two layers of ruffles. Since there are 8 sections and each section has 4 twists it will take a total of 64 ruffles to complete the ball.

The ruffles were made by cutting 10" lengths of mesh yielding a square piece to make the ruffle. Since the rolls have 10 yards....you can get 36 ruffles from each roll of mesh.

We use a 24" x 36" self healing Omnigrid Cutting Mat and a 45mm Omnigrid Rotary Cutter (these are available at Amazon and we have included our affiliate links.)

Take the 10" piece of mesh and lay it flat on the table (it is naturally curvy so lay it curved side down). Scrunch up or gather up through the middle of the flat piece of mesh (selvage edges to the sides) and pinch it in the middle with your fingers, forming a ruffle.

Place the ruffle in one of the twists and secure with a couple of turns. You can place the ruffles on the ball in a pattern or just randomly, anyway you want to. We did this one in a sort of stripe pattern with the same color down each section.

You can work around the entire ball with one layer, or you can go ahead and do two layers at a time. For this project, I think it was easier to do two layers at a time.

To secure the second ruffle, just open up a twist and lay the second ruffle down on top of the first, offset it a little and re-secure the twist with a couple of turns. If you are not planning to add any other items such as ribbons or anything, you can secure the twist with 3-4 turns at this time since it's the last layer.

After the ruffles were completed, we chose a strand of battery powered LED lights from RAZ.

This is a 20' string of LED lights with a warm glow. They are on a tiny silver wire which makes them safe for immersing in water also (not the battery pack, just the lights). The string has 60 LED lights and operates of three AA batteries. We wound the lights around the ball and tucked the battery pack inside the bottom of the ball so it was easy to find to turn off and on. The string lights also have a timer that operates for 6 hours and repeats every 18 hours.....very convenient)))

The last thing we did was find a sparkly white ribbon to use as a hanger. The Work ball has a metal loop on top that makes it very east to attach a cord, ribbon or something to hang it by.

This decoration is perfect for inside or outside entertaining. You can suspend them from the ceiling, or hang from trees for back yard ambient light. Lots of possibilities. The Work Ball also comes in an evergreen color which works great just covered with a string of tiny Christmas lights. They look like a light ball hanging from trees.

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