Christmas decorations

I’ve mentioned before that each Christmas I make tree decorations for my husband’s staff and my daughters’ teachers and tutors. I’ve been plugging away at them and have now finished the embroidery of 17 of them. I think that I have only one or two more to do.

What I have found interesting about this is that normally I hate doing any embroidery design more than once, and yet, I have been quite happy to do 17 of them so far! Maybe its just because I’m still so enamoured with the beautiful, beautiful, gorgeous, luscious single ply silk from Stitches and Spice that I have been using!

The design that I am working is going to be published in the next issue of The Gift of Stitching magazine in their Christmas ornament issue, so when its out, I’ll finally show you a picture. And you’ll be able to purchase a copy so that you can make your own if you’d like to! I’m really looking forward to seeing the other ornaments in the issue as well as they are usually very inspiring.

The thing that I have been enjoying about the silk is the way you can vary the look of it. For some of the stitches I have been untwisting the thread so that it sits flat and has great coverage. And for some of the other stitching I have been using it twisted as it comes. Its interesting to see the different effects you can achieve with the one thread.

The design also features a small amount of Gilt Sylke Twist, which is a thread that was developed to be used on the Faith jacket. I bought some quite some time back, wondering what I might use it on. It was terribly expensive, but I wanted to give it a try. It is very nice, and the little bit of gold that goes around the silk core does look pretty, but seriously I do wonder if its worth the expense!

Now, the thing I have been perplexed about for the ornaments is whether I should make some of them into bookmarks using the gold plated bookmark findings that I recently got. What do you think? (I guess it is a bit hard not knowing what the ornaments look like, but let’s just imagine a tiny pillow-like thing with embroidery on one side.) Would you prefer to receive a special bookmark, or a Christmas tree ornament? You could use one all the time, whereas the other would get put away only for Christmas use.