Yesterday, we looked at making your own pounce for embroidery design transfers. Today, we’ll look at the pouncer itself.
There are many, many ways you can go about making your own pouncer for your pounce powder. You can use just a simple piece of rolled up felt, for example. It’ll work fine, and if you have scraps of felt lying about, it’ll cost you nothing.
But since I’ve got three colors of pounce powder, I like to have three different pouncers, one for each color. This is how I made mine.
I started with these round wooden knobs or balls, which are available at any craft store, about 8 to a package, for less than $3.
What you’re looking for is something with a flat area about an inch in diameter. Incidentally, you could just buy an inch-wide dowel, and cut it into two-inch long pieces. You’d get about 18 pieces from one 36″ dowel. This assumes you have a way of cutting the dowel – or you could just ask the friendly folks at your neighborhood lumberyard to cut it into pieces for you. Sometimes, they will. Sometimes, they won’t. Sometimes, they’ll charge you for cutting it. Sometimes, they won’t. If you’re making up pounce kits for a guild group, the dowel would be a good way to go to get multiple inexpensive tool forms.
Then, at your local hardware store – or better yet, at a dollar store! – pick up a package of 8 furniture protectors that are made out of a rough kind of (probably synthetic) carpet-type felt. These are adhesive, and they are about an inch in diameter. Incidentally, these things never stay put on furniture for very long, but since our pounce tool isn’t going to get the same wear and tear as a chair (sorry for the really bad rhyming sequence there), these work just great for our needs.
It’s just a matter of peal-and-stick here. Peal off the paper backing from one round furniture protector, and stick it to the flat surface of the wooden knob, or to the end of the dowel segment, if you’re using a dowel segment.
You now have a pounce tool.
Smother the felt pad in pounce, and proceed to rub it over your pricked patterns. It works great.
I keep my little tub of pounce and pouncer in a little sealable plastic box that’s about 4″ square, so any residual pounce mess is kept within the little storage box. Better not to have the pouncer just floating about loose on a shelf. I have three of these boxes, one for each color of pounce and its corresponding tool.
So that’s how I make up my little pounce kits. All told, between the talc and the charcoal powder, I have enough pounce to last me a life time of transfers. Charcoal, talc, containers, and pouncers combined cost me less than $20. I could easily split the quantity with another person – 4 pouncers, plenty of each color pounce powder – for about $10 each. Not bad! If your guild or embroidery group is planning to work on a group project that will require pricking and pouncing the embroidery design, pooling resources and working up individual pounce kits like this would be the way to go.
Other articles relating to the prick and pounce embroidery design transfer method can be found here:
Mixing Your Own Pounce, in three colors
Powdered Charcoal for Pounce (and resources)
Talc for Pouncing Dark Fabrics
How to Transfer an Embroidery Design with Prick and Pounce
If you have any questions or added suggestions or ideas, feel free to leave a comment below!
Enjoy your weekend – I hope you get in some stitching time! (I definitely intend to!)
