My modern guild loves dirty Santa games and loves pincushions, so a recent challenge involved making a pincushion to swap.  I found a nice cup and saucer at a thrift store and decided to make that into a pincushion.

I previously researched tutorials for making pincushions and learned that ground English walnut shells are one of the best types of stuffing for them.  The shells are heavy (dense) enough to keep the pincushion from coming up with the pin you are trying to remove from it, and they are ground fine enough to allow pins to be stuck in easily.  Ground walnut shells are available in pet stores, where folks apparently think I want them for my pet lizard to use as desert sand.  (They’re mistaken about that, but I bought the ground walnut shells anyway.)

The problem was how to get the walnut shells firmly packed into a nice round ball that would fit smoothly into the cup.  I solved that problem by rescuing a discarded athletic sock from the trash, which is why there’s a sock in the picture of the cup above!

I cut off the toe of the sock, stuffed it with ground walnut shells, and closed it tightly with a rubber band.

I patted the filled sock into shape so that it fit nicely in the cup.

Then I cut a circle of fabric and gathered the edge with a long machine stitch.

After drawing up the edge of the circle as much as I could around the base of the sock, I finished drawing it tight by adding another rubber band.

And before you ask, the size of the circle was a guess–I just used the largest circle on my circle cutting template.

Finally, I stuffed the whole thing into the cup, rubber band side down.  It was heavy enough and fit tightly enough that it did not need to be glued in.  I did glue the cup to the saucer, however.

And that was it!  So easy and so fun!