Getting felted up

I stumbled onto this super-sweet star ornament tutorial the other day, which seemed like a perfect use of some odds and ends of saffron yellow wool yarn left over from making these:

(from my Etsy store)

I decided to make a few modifications of my own...first, by using my worsted weight yarn scraps and US 7/4.5mm needles.  To make it even bigger, I started with ten additional stitches - i.e. an extra one stitch before and after the first and last decreases, and two extra stitches between the rest.  Then I simply picked up with the existing instructions.

Once this was done, I added a crochet trim in a contrasting 100% wool yarn in the same weight, using a 4.5mm hook.  This entailed one single crochet into each edge stitch all the way around except for the stitch at each point, which each got 3 SCs, and the one stitch at each "valley" between points, which was skipped.

With a chained loop, a slip-stitch to secure and the end woven in, that was done.

Finally, since I needed practice hand-fulling things anyway for a certain Christmas gift I'm finishing up, I decided to felt it.  TECHknitter has a great little tutorial on the topic here, which I more or less followed. Once I was satisfied with the amount of felted-ness, I squeezed out as much water as possible and shaped it to my liking, then just hung it on the tree to dry.

So easy and so cute!  I think I'll be making more...