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Snowman Ornaments Complete

Snowman Ornaments Complete

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Thanks for all the suggestions for completing the back of my snowmen ornaments. There were some great ideas which I might have tried except for the fact that this was supposed to be a quick project. I have seven ornaments and I already have thought of more than seven people that I could give them to as holiday gifts. So I really couldn’t do them back to back or I would have had to double my workload. I liked the idea of a cord around the edge or blanket stitch to snazz up the design, but again, that would take much more time than I have allowed myself for this project. So I took the easy way out and fused black craft felt circles to the back of each ornament. Before I did that, I stitched on a hanger with some black shiny cord that I have in my stash.

Here’s the back of one of the ornaments. I didn’t worry too much about an exact circle but just cut them to match the felted circles. You can definitely tell it’s hand crafted!

And here they are all together. I kept thinking I should be naming them like the Seven Dwarves, Happy, Bashful… But they were all fairly happy so I wasn’t sure I could come up with enough names meaning Happy.

I did use plastic over the last set of six while felting to see if there would be less transfer of black and red fiber to the snowman face. It was slightly less and definitely kept the surface of the felt a little smoother. The one on the bottom right is the one I didn’t use plastic on when felting and it is a little darker than the others, maybe.

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And here they all are separately a bit bigger. All the faces were stitched with #5 perle cotton and the hat bands are sari silk ribbon. I don’t usually do “cute” so it was a departure from my usual style but I enjoyed creating the different faces on each one.

Have you created any holiday decorations this year? We’d love to see over on the forum, you can post any photos of your hand crafted holiday creations here (either past or present).

Holiday Decorations – Fourth Quarter Challenge

Holiday Decorations – Fourth Quarter Challenge

Comments 12 comments

I have been thinking about what holiday decorations that I wanted to make for the Fourth Quarter Challenge. I wanted to do something simple and decided to try creating an ornament with prefelt. I don’t usually use prefelt in creating my designs so I thought I would give it a try. I decided on a snowman design.

I had commercial prefelt in white and black but none in red. So I created a piece of red prefelt as the first step from mixed 56’s hand dyed fiber.

Next I needed a circle of red prefelt from the background. I wanted my finished ornament to be around 5″ diameter so I used this approximately 7″ container to cut around. I used a craft blade and essentially just scored around the container and then finished cutting the circle out with scissors.

I had enough red prefelt for 7 circles. I hadn’t really planned on making multiples but what the heck, I might else well make more, right?

Next I cut out two circles in white prefelt, two black hat shapes and a black circle to go behind the red circle. I decided that my red prefelt wasn’t going to be heavy enough with just one layer. I used black instead of white because I like a deeper red better than I like a pink. I didn’t have enough red prefelt for two layers. Now on to felting.

I had hoped with two layers of white prefelt that I wouldn’t get a lot of fiber migration. No such luck. I did shave a bit off the surface of the white so it wouldn’t look so hairy and that helped. I only felted this one just to see how it would come out. Next time, I think I will cover with a light plastic to try and prevent any movement of red and black fibers into the white. This one was rubbed with my hand so I think that I got a bit of movement of fiber as well as migration through.

Now on to more decoration. I stitched a small piece of sari ribbon on to the hat for a band. The sari ribbon adds a bit of shine. Then I hand stitched the facial features. Now I have to decide if the ornament needs further backing, if it needs an edging treatment and how to hang it. What would you suggest?

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