Striped Christmas Ornaments

These ornaments are my latest design availaible on patternsonline.com earlier this week.

These are another simple/not simple design. It's simple to come up with different striped patterns but not so simple to make the round shape. I ended up with a compass and graph paper tracing various sized circles until I got one that lined up nicely. The patterns still don't look like a perfect circle, but they are close enough for me.

I could have spent the whole day designing stripes on graph paper but I restrained myself after designing just four good ones. I have several not so good ones that I'll work on later.

Next came the colors. It was hard using the same four colors for each ornaments. There are so many great shades of red and green to choose from. I ended up with 2 greens, a red and a pink. Although pink isn't as traditional as red and green it's fun and brightens up the ornaments.

Although these patterns look like they could have come from a fair isle sweater, they didn't. As I was stitching my second one the design reminded me of a sweater.

On a sheet of perforated paper, the circles don't look very impressive. But once they are cut out and finished they look great.

I know that not everybody had a compass so I wanted an easy way to finish the ornaments. I ransacked the house looking for an easy circle to use for the shape (perhaps I should have done that before I stitched all the ornaments). CD's are way too big. Thread spools are way too small. The glasses in the cupboard where also way too big. Then I headed for the pantry. Canned fruit and tomato sauce where all too big. Then I found it - tomato soup! Just the perfect size to go around the ornament (about 2 5/8 inches).

I traced the can to make a template. Before cutting it out I drew a line down the center. I added a small point at the bottom and a rectangle at the top. All I had to do was cut out the template and trace it on to the back of the ornament. I centered it by eye, holding it up to a light, without worrying too much about making it look perfect.

Another finishing idea that I tried was centering the template on the back of a blank card. This time I cut out the shape of the ornament and placed the ornament behind. This worked best with a red or green card. With a white card you couldn't see the outline of the ornament.

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Erica's Stitches

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