How to Make God’s Eye Tutorial

How to make God's Eye. All you need is sticks and yarn. Love this vintage style craft!

God’s Eye Tutorial

Hey there! It’s Alexis from Persia Lou, and today I have a tutorial for a familiar craft that you may have made at camp back in the day. They are called god’s eyes, and while I never actually made these as a kid, I had a lot of fun making them as decorations for my daughter’s recent camping themed party.

God's Eye Craft

I love the way these turned out, and I’m planning on keeping a few favorites up as decorations in our home. Macrame and woven wall hangings are coming back in popularity, and I think these totally fit in with that trend! By using different techniques and types of yarn, you can create lots of patterns and textures.

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How To Make God’s Eye

Materials

  • Two 12″ dowels
  • yarn (try using different colors, weights, and fibers)
  • scissors

To start, put two dowels next to each other, and tie them together with a double knot around the middle.

how to make a God's eye

Twist the dowels so they are perpendicular to one another. Now it’s time to start wrapping!

There are basically two different ways to wrap the yarn around the dowel: over and under. To wrap the yarn over the dowel, pull the yarn strand across the top of the dowel, pull it under the dowel, behind the back, and back over the top. Then move on to the next dowel. Just like this:

god's eye craft

To wrap the yarn under, start with the yarn beneath the dowel, pull it up over and behind again, and then move onto the next dowel. Like so:

crafting with yarn

If you wrap the entire piece going one direction, it will look like this:

god's eye tutorial

You get a flat look on the “over” side, and you can see the wrapped dowel on the “under” side. If you alternate wrapping every other dowel under and over, the piece will look like this:

god's eye craft

And for the piece above, I alternated over and under and occasionally switched directions to create an interesting texture. Play around with wrapping the yarn in different directions and patterns to create lots of different looks!

To change yarns, simply tie the working yarn to one end of the new yarn and keep on wrapping! When you are finished with your piece, tie off the yarn and secure with a bit of glue if you like. I also liked the look of adding tassels to some of my god’s eyes.

To make tassels, you will need a small piece of cardboard.

how to make a yarn tassel

  1. Wrap yarn around the piece of cardboard until you have enough yarn to create a nice tassel – not too thick or too thin.
  2. Cut a new piece of yarn and push it under the yarn on one end. Tie a tight double knot.
  3. Cut the tassel off the cardboard by cutting the loops on the end opposite where you tied the knot.
  4. Tie a new piece of yarn about an inch from the knotted end (a contrasting color looks great!). Wrap the yarn around the tassel and secure with a dot of hot glue.

Attach the tassels to the ends of the dowels with a knot and a little bit of glue.

God's eye craft

I love the tassels! And I really love the way the this ruffle yarn looks wrapped up in there. It creates such great texture!

yarn craft

I love how simple these are – just yarn and sticks! – but still lots of fun possibilities for color and pattern. I hope you enjoy making them as much as we did!

God's Eye Tutorial

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Comments

  1. 1

    Hi Alexis. Great post! I have made one or two of these at Girl Scout camp and even Girl Scout meetings when I was very young. I actually still have mine. I am more familiar with the full one without tassels. I love the one pictured at the pink one with the green tassels pictured in the very first picture. I think this will go on my to-do list for today. Thanks :)

    1. 1.1

      Thanks, Heather! Yeah, my versions are necessarily the traditional technique. :) I went a little different with it, but that’s kind of the cool thing with these crafts – they are totally adaptable! Have fun making them!

  2. 2

    Love!!! Pinning! I think some of these might have to sneak into our boys’ camp themed room redo!