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Sunday 20 November 2011

Christmas Crafts No 7 - Felt Tree Decorations

The final blog in this series of Christmas crafts is idea number 7 - Felt decorations. These are quite cute decorations that can be made to hang on the tree, strung together to make a unique banner or even used at gift tags for someone special.
To make these you will need:
Felt material of various colours, glitter glue, jingle bells, sewing thread, sewing needle, buttons and scissors.
 The complete set of felt Christmas Decorations
To start you will need to decide on what decoration you would like to make. Cut out all the pieces required to make your decoration. Once again I have not used a template but I did lay out all the pieces prior to sewing together and photographed them. You can print this picture off and make templates that you can use but cutting around the shapes and drawing them onto a piece of card. You can then cut the pieces out of the card and use these to draw around on your fabric. Alternatively you could cut the pieces out of funky foam and glue them together.
I have made all my decorations uniform so that they resembled a set of decorations. Each decoration has the same size house, snow on the roof and chimney, all character have a scarf and all the body parts are the same size.
Originally I planned to sew the bricks onto the houses as a bit of extra detail in the background. However when I placed the glitter glue around the snow on the roof and chimney, I really liked the effect. So I decided to glitter glue the bricks onto the felt house.
While the glue was drying I sewed together all the parts to make my character topper. Any detail that needed embroidering was completed first. This included sewing on the eyes, nose and any other facial features. The character was then sewn together systematically, feet first then up to the the arms, scarf and around the head.
When the glue was dry, I sewed the two parts of the house together adding the snow resting on the top of the roof and the chimney. Make sure you don't forget to add a piece of extra thread at the top of the decoration to enable you to hang your final piece onto your tree.
Finally the topper was sewn (or you could glue) in place and for a final detail a jingle bell was added to the bottom of the decoration.  I mainly used blanket stitch however changed to a running stitch for the facial features as I found the blanket stitch looked a bit messy. You can see the difference in the facial features of the Ginger bread man compared to the others.
If you are unsure of how to sew a blanket stitch you can follow the instruction on the following website  http://www.cutoutandkeep.net/projects/how_to_blanket_stitch  
See below for the final results.
 All the piece for all four decorations cut out ready to stitch together
 The completed "Snowman" decoration
 The completed "Reindeer" decoration
 The completed "Penguin" decoration
The completed "Gingerbread" decoration

I hope that you have enjoyed the Christmas crafts posted on my blog this week. I am currently running numerous Christmas crafts workshops for all ages from 5 -99 years. If you are interested in booking a session for your school, club or organisation please contact me on lisamart@hotmail.co.uk
Next week I will posted seven different ideas of Christmas crafts that you can do with children Keep posted.

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