How to Make Homemade Woolen Dryer Balls, eliminate dryer sheets for good!

Do you want to eliminate commercial dryer sheets? Yep, the same ones full of chemicals and paraffin? We did too. I made the switch and we have never looked back! And the best part? Your clothes are just as soft when you take them from the dryer...From the DIY Homemade Household, side of the blog! Come and take a look at How to make Homemade Woolen Dryer Balls. 

Homemade Wool Dryer Balls. 

They are rustic yet worth their weight in gold! 

While these Homemade Woolen Dryer Balls will not win any beauty contests, they are excellent when used to soften your clothes during the drying cycle, and doing it without the use of dryer sheets! They also work quite well in eliminating static cling in most natural fabrics and those with a mix of fibers. However...

For those clothes that can and do produce excess static, you can easily reduce the static with a couple of different tips. My new favorite tip is to place a large safety pin in each dryer ball. Since I pinned my wool dryer balls, static is all but eliminated. But to be fair, I wear mostly cotton clothes. Which is getting harder to find. But I usually choose clothes with 85% cotton fibers. 

These wool dryer balls are going on 15 years of use!

Another tip that does work is small aluminum foil balls! Just toss in a couple homemade foil balls into the dryer along with your Homemade Woolen Dryer Balls. I have used aluminum foil balls from time to time, especially when I was still working away and out of the home. Often my work clothes were a blended material with less cotton fibers. 

The aluminum foil balls are just that, small balls of compressed aluminum foil. 

To make them, simply take a square of foil and crush it in your hands, and then begin to  "roll" into a ball, making sure there are no sharp edges or corners of foil to snag your clothes. After many uses, (up to 20) they will begin to break apart. But it is easy to make more. And simply toss the well-used foil balls into the recycling bin when you need to make more.  

I have found that 2 - 3 Wool Dryer Balls are perfect for a full load of laundry. But more won't hurt. And to be honest, I now store the balls right in the dryer. Before using the safety pins I would find that the wool dryer balls would become "lost" in a load of clothes, when they would be caught up with static. But the added benefit of less static is that the balls are left behind in the dryer when I remove the clothes. Rarely does one get caught up in the clothes and have to be returned to the dryer. Except for fitted sheets, that gathered pocket at each corner of the sheet is the perfect hiding spot for a woolen dryer ball!  

The woolen dryer balls don't really wear out and they don't leave behind any chemicals. But I did notice that the thinner sweater material that I felted for dryer balls did begin to have holes form in the outside layers. But that was after about 10 years. I have tossed out the pink balls in the photo above. However the maroon balls are still in use! I have been using this set of Homemade Wool Dryer Balls for over 5 10 15 years now...

Why did I make my own?

I had priced wool yarn for this project and did not want to spend $8 for each skein. At that price, I thought I would wait and see if I could find some wool yarn while out thrifting. As luck would have it, I found none. But what I did find was a 100% wool sweater for a very small sum and decided to give making my own wool dryer balls a try. But first I had to felt the sweater... 

These Homemade Wool Dryer Balls came together quickly with strips of woolen sweater fabric, that I previously had felted in hot water during the wash cycle, and a hot dryer to dry. To be honest with you, felting a sweater is so easy, sometimes it is done by accident...No worries, if you have never felted anything before, whether on purpose or by accident, I give full instructions for felting!

  

 Supplies needed for this recipe:

• wool sweater(s)

You will also need the following:

• needle and thread

• scissors

Now we are ready to begin! 

However, this will only work for a 100% wool sweater.

To began you must felt the wool sweater. Felting for this project is a simple process involving washing and drying on the hottest settings that your washer and dryer have or will allow. When felted, the wool shrinks and tightens up. The sweater no longer looks like a knitted sweater, it looks like thick felt material. The sweater will be much smaller than when you began! 

From there you simply cut the sweaters into one inch strips.

When making woolen dryer balls from yarn, you roll the yarn into balls and then felt the balls. With the felted sweater, I already had felted yarn, the only difference is that this yarn was knitted into a sweater. Which I had cut into strips. Those strips were used to make up the balls...

To make Homemade Felted Woolen Dryer Balls: 

Cut the felted sweater into wide strips, they don't have to be perfect as this is a utility project and not intended to be beautiful. This felted sweater also had a banded edge, this came off as one strip. You may use this for the center or beginning of the ball if desired.

Start with a banded edge piece (if you have one) and begin winding into a ball. Tack with needle and thread as needed, to help keep the ball shape. 

As the balls are being formed, whip stitch over each raw or cut edge to stabilize and strengthen the ball. I tend to "over sew" in a case like this. It is better to "over sew" than to have to mend later and I don't want them coming apart in the dryer. These are about the size of an orange. 

I also made some dryer balls the size of a grapefruit. I found the larger size dryer balls were especially handy for larger and/or heavier clothes like blue jeans. 

Between the aluminum balls and/or safety pins for static and the felted balls for softening, we have it covered!

With that, you are ready to tackle the laundry!

PLUS THIS HANDY TIP! 

After a few times of playing "find the dryer ball", I got creative and sewed a smaller ball to each of the larger balls. This created a shape much less likely to roll or bounce away, and personally, I like them even more now! They are not pretty, but they sure do a good job and provide exactly what I need. Static free, soft clothes. 

UPDATED: 07.18.2026

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