Sequined Christmas Trees

Since these ornaments have been my most popular design and since holiday season is almost here, I think I should write about the Sequined Christmas Trees.

After I made arrangements with patternsonline.com I had a deadline - a certain number of patterns by a certain date. I had some patterns already but I still had to come up a few new patterns.

I decided on Christmas Ornaments. After all, Christmas is a popular stitching time and I figured I could whip out some ornaments rather quickly. Wrong! Designing smaller patterns is easier and quicker than designing bigger patterns ... up to a point. At a certain size, the smaller patterns become harder. There is less space to work with and, since there is less stitching, every stitch is important.

My first attempts where pathetic. The trees didn't look right. The stitch placement was awkard with no places to hide the threads (I was stitching on perforated paper and you can't have threads running across the back). When I got to the sequins they covered a lot of the stitches. They will NOT be pictured in this blog.

I ended up having to determine how many graph paper squares a sequin covered. I'd design a branch, place the sequins, design another branch. It was slow working in this fashion, but the finished tree looked much better.

Next came the fun part - embellishing! I went through my supplies and found ribbon, beads, lace and rick-rack and fun coming up with a different look for each ornament.

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