catch up post #4! machine embroidered ornaments!

every year i try to send a little something out with my cards. it doesn't always happen, but i try! it needs to be something fairly flat, so my postage bill isn't ridiculous, and it needs to be something that will take the abuse of the mail (which is ALWAYS worse around the holidays!).

this year i decided to machine embroider something (of course!).

i absolutely love vintage glass ornaments, i have a ridiculous collection of them (huge!). most of mine are just simple balls, but i love all the shapes and sizes that were made. i decided to draw up some vintage ornaments and then digitize them.

this took a lot of fiddling between photoshop and PE Design. i edited the images constantly, testing them digitized, until i got them perfect (now you see why i was lazier for the gift card holders?!). even though i embroidered them all in one colour, i made the files multi coloured, so that i could better control which stitch was used for each part of the ornament. when the image used in PE Design is all one colour, the software wants to use the same stitch for the entire thing. i wanted to switch between the fill stitch and the satin stitch, so this is what one of my files looked like -


and the ornaments themselves -


i embroidered as many as i could fit on each piece of felt, and then after embroidering, i lay another piece behind them and stitched around each ornament. i trimmed them, and added a grommet to hold the ribbon. i really love how they turned out.




i wanted to do some non-traditional colours too!






crows, of course!







i have a couple of friends who celebrate hanukkah either instead of or in addition to christmas, so i made star of david ornamants for them.



i was really happy with how they turned out, and they were pretty easy to do! i think i made around 50 in total, and i've only got a couple left!