If you're a regular reader of my blog you'll know that I've had some of Alicia's Christmas ornament kits for years and am finally making an effort to get them all stitched and ready for Christmas.
I finished the first seven this summer...
... then finished another four a few weeks ago:
They're large, double-sided ornaments, with lots of pieces and details to stitch but I'm getting there slowly!
I've almost finished the Gingerbread Girl; I just need to embroider her face, add the ric rac hanging loop and stitch the front and back together.
I'm waiting for a day when I'm feeling particularly focused, as I don't want to mess up the little details of her face!
I also need to add the face to the Notevena Mouse...
... and give him some feet, of course!
I've been deliberately leaving the fiddliest bits of these ornaments until last, skipping ahead of Alicia's instructions to do so (tsk tsk). For example, I should have stitched the little candle in the Lighted Window already, but there's been no harm done by leaving it until later.
If you're ever going to skip ahead with a tutorial, you should - of course! - read the instructions all the way through to make sure you're not going to cause yourself any problems later on. Sometimes the order things get stitched in is just a matter of personal preference, but sometimes there's an important reason why you need to stitch X before Y and if you stitch Y before X you'll end up in a pickle.
Really, you ought to read the instructions all the way through before you start stitching at all and definitely before you start cutting anything out. I foolishly didn't do this when I first began work on these patterns. I just went ahead and cut out all the pieces based on the colours and quantities marked on the template sheet.... and now I am, as you might expect, in a bit of a pickle.
I shouldn't have cut out the Whistling Tea Kettle shapes before embroidering the design, so my tea kettle is now going to end up with some extra layers of felt or fabric in the middle as I'll need to tack the shapes to some material so I can place them in embroidery hoops and stitch the flowers.
Not ideal, but hopefully it'll work out okay and I'll have a lovely finished tea kettle ornament to show you guys soon!
Click here to find all these lovely patterns on Alicia's website.
Click here to find lots more Christmas crafting ideas in my tutorial archive.
4 comments:
Some lovely stitching - and thank you for the wise reminder about reading right through the instructions first. I've learned the hard way that the order of work is there for a good reason!
I'm not in Christmas mood yet but these little and fun ornaments reminded me of it! All the tiny details are just amazing!
These all look so beautiful. I can imagine a tree decorated simply with all of them. x
Angela - it's good to know I'm not the only one who's learned that the hard way! You'd think I'd know better, the amount of tutorial instructions I've written over the years, but nope. Haha.
bairozan - these designs are SO beautifully detailed! They're making me want to design a few intricate festive things of my own...
Kay - oh, that would be wonderful!
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