DIY Leather and Yarn Tassels

Put a little Bohemian Farmhouse bling in your life with these easy DIY Leather and Yarn Tassels! Free Cricut cut file included!

For a while now, I’ve been wanting to share some news with you. Can you guess what it is? No, we are not being featured in a magazine! Thank you though – that is lovely of you to think so! I was also pretty hopeful about finding Greg’s pictures (in his Calvins) in a magazine or two! LOL. Any other guesses? Oh, how I wish, but we didn’t win the lottery either. I promise I’ll let you know if we do though 😉 Ok, since no better guesses are coming my way, here it is: my babes… my awesome and wonderful and one-of-a-kind-hubby… ahem – please don’t mind me buttering him up, as he really deserves it with this one :-D… yes, so this brilliant guy gifted me with a Cricut Maker! As you can guess, I was over the moon with my gift. I am telling you: he is the best! I received my gift just last week and straight away started using it – shocking, right? Hahahaha 😀 And let me tell you – the Cricut Maker is a work horse and cuts even the thick materials like a breeze! I really love it! So much that I can talk hours and hours about it, but I’ll spare you from that torture and instead I’ll show you what I did with it.

Cricut Maker cut the leather and I did the rest. What do you think? Cool, aren’t they? 😀 I made a bunch to turn into key-rings and bag charms as they make great stocking fillers or hostess gifts. Besides, they are so easy to make! But don’t let that “easy” fool you, because the prices for these little cutie-pies go anywhere from $15 to $350. Not kidding with that $350 – you can check this one here and see it for yourself. Hence I was saying they make really great little gifts 😉

While I was at it, I made some yarn tassels, too. I use these usually as gift toppers, but they make great garlands, too. Some people even tie them to baskets or pillows to bring some color and fun to otherwise plain and dull things.

All in all, I love the simple and charming look of tassels, and I’m going to show you how to make them. So what do you think? Do you want to make some tassels with me? Then let’s gather the materials first, shall we?

Now that we have the materials list out of the way, let’s start with the leather tassels.

DIY Leather Tassels

If you have a Cricut Maker (or Explore), go ahead and download the tassel SVG cut-files I shared at the “SVGs – Stencils” section of the VIP Patch. If you are using a 1/2 copper coupling, then upload the small tassel file to the Cricut Design Space and set the height of the image to 6 inches. Next, select your material to “Genuine Leather” with “more” pressure setting. Then, press the cut button and let your Cricut do its magic.

Don’t have a Cricut? No problem! I didn’t have it until recently either, so I made some of my tassels the good old fashioned way, which is still very easy: I grabbed my ruler and the rotary cutter, and cut my leather to 6 inches height. In the beginning, I couldn’t decide how thick I wanted my tassels, hence I used the entire width of the leather.

Next, I started cutting the fringes 1/4 inch wide and 4.25 tall.

Once I was finished with cutting the fringes, I decided that I wanted my my tassels on the thinner side and cut the width to 4.5 inches. Then, I cut a string of leather 1/4 inch wide and 2-3 inches tall. This was going to be the hanging loop of the tassel. I folded the string to create a loop at the top and hot glued it at the bottom.

Here is an important note: depending on how your key chain or metal clasp attaches, you may need to put your leather string through the clasp first, and then hot glue the leather string at the bottom, so that your metal clasp is within that loop.

Next, I hot glued the loop at the beginning of my fringed leather and started rolling my leather around that loop.

When I reached the end of the fringed leather, I secured the roll using hot glue.

Now my tassel was essentially complete, but I wanted to add some bling to it, as it was a little too plain. I grabbed a copper coupling and slid it to the top as a tassel cap. There you go…it looks much better now, doesn’t it?

Next, I attached my metal swivel clasp to the loop, and that was it.

If you don’t like the the copper look or any other metal tassel cap, you can also tie a leather string or hemp cord around like I did with some of my suede tassels. To do that, you can follow the steps shown in the pictures below. I started wrapping from one top corner towards the opposite bottom corner, then after making the round, I brought my cord right to the top again. This was so I would have a nice big loop at the bottom to be able to neatly tie off the entire thing.

I carried on wrapping my hemp cord around the neck until I reached the bottom.

Once I reached the bottom, I threaded my hemp cord through the loop I created at the very beginning. Then I pulled the other end (the beginning end) of the cord to move the threaded cord under the wrapped part. Once the threaded cord moved underneath wrapped part, I cut both excess ends.

And voila! Not too shabby, are they?

Let’s move on to making some yarn and embroidery floss tassels now, shall we?

DIY Yarn and Embroidery Floss Tassels

For yarn tassels, I first cut my pieces of cardboard in the size I wanted my tassels to be.

Then, I started wrapping yarn around those cardboard pieces.

The number of times you wrap depends entirely on how thick you want your tassel to be. I like full-looking yarn tassels, hence I wrapped the yarn about 55 times. Once I liked the thickness, I threaded a piece of yarn and tied the whole thing on one end.

Then I grabbed my scissors, and cut the other end of the yarn.

As I made quite a bit of a tassels, I decided to go with two different styles. The first one was sliding copper couplings on my yarn tassels.

And the second style was simply tying another piece of yarn to create a little neck.

As the final step, I trimmed the ends to have the yarn one length, and that was it!

Embroidery floss tassels are also made the same way as the yarn tassels. As the embroidery floss has thinner thread than yarn, I normally use a tassel cap when I make them. But as I made bigger tassels than usual, I used again copper couplings with these ones.

And this is the end of my little tassel project – I hope you like them! Next up is another small DIY project where I use some of these tassels. Can you guess? Stay tuned to see if your guess was right! 😉

Handan, xo