Recently, I sent three temari to rehab. These three had been relegated to the time-out corner for, um, years, because the either the designs, or the colors, or both, simply weren't working for me. And I had never even finished the one shown on top, with the multicolored wrapping.

First, I hoped that I could simply tweak these a bit, add careful embellishments to rectify the problems and quickly add three new temari to my inventory. However, I had to scrap this plan because I no longer had the shades and weight of perle cotton threads I had used on these!

Not wanting to waste any more materials than necessary, I decided to deconstruct the balls and begin again with the base wrappings.

After spending quite a bit of time snipping and pulling threads and cursing, I can tell you that my temari are very sturdily made. They are NOT fragile, and though I don't recommend them as cat or dog toys, they are quite disinclined to come apart.

The deconstruction process resulted in quite a few inadvertent snips of the wrapping threads