DIY pom-pom rug

Finished product for my Goddaughter!

I bought non-slip carpet backing at a local discount store that was 20" x 32".

I bought yarn, lots and lots of yarn. Pictured below is NOT enough to complete a rug of that size. 

For the blue and white rug above, I used 1 white remnant, 1x100g ball, plus about 1/3-1/2 of the white one above; what you see is what I have left. I used 2 blue remnants, unravelled a child-sized blue sweater (recycling!) plus 1x100g ball and 2x198g balls of blue. Just to give you an idea of how much you would need. I did make my pom-poms pretty dense, they could have been smaller, but I'm not sure if that would mean you'd need more pom-poms overall. 

The green and white will be for my daughter. I'll post a picture when I'm done. 

I basically followed these directions:

http://www.socreativethings.com/how-to-make-pompom-rugs/

Wrap the yarn around your fingers many times, no fixed number. The more turns the denser, fuller the pom-pom. Use 2, 3, 4 fingers to adjust the size or a carboard template the size you want. Slide it off, cut the yarn, then cut a longish piece of yarn to tie around the middle. I wrapped around once, tied one knot, the. Wrapped to opposite side and tied a very tight double knot. Leave the strings.

Use scissors or snips like those below to cut all the loops. These snips are also great for rag quilts!

Make sure not to cut the two long strigs.

Now use those snips to trim the pom-pom to a nice round shape. This is messy!! Do it somewhere where either the bits fall onto a table and can easily be brushed off into a dust pan, or a floor that can easily be swept. I worked in the living room so I could watch TV while I snipped, but the bits stick to the couch!!

Trimmed, ready to be tied onto the non-slip backing.

Repeat making the pompoms over and over. I used approx. 150 pom-poms in the blue and white rug. i reccommend making them all before tying them on. I also recommend deciding on a pattern first and trying to without tying to make sure you have enough. I luckily did a random pattern, but ran out with about 2 rows to go. I still had lots fo white yarn, but did not want blue and white everywhere and then 2 rows of solid white! That was when I needed to unravel a too-small sweater to bet the extra yarn. i also had to untie a few pom-poms elsewhere in the rug in different shades and replace them with the blue from the sweater to even put the overall pattern. BTW it took 3 of us about 2 hours to unravel a size 5-ish sweater!!! 

Since I worked on this an hour here, 2 hours there, I don't know exactly how long it took, but I know I worked on it over the course of 6-7 weeks, guessing about 5-7 hours/week, so 30-50 hours. Be prepared, you cannot do this in one day.

So I layed out my pattern row by row, then tied them on. Don't cut off all the excess string right away, in case, like me, you decided to move things around later. Once I was 100% done tying them on, I put a drop of hot glue on each knot then cut off the excess. Once dry I flipped it over to the good side and and checked for spots where the rug either didn't lay right or there was a little gap and glued the pom-poms together, down at the base where it would not show. Have lots of glue sticks on hand!!

Good luck!