Holiday Ornaments

Last week I was in need of some hand crafted holiday ornaments to donate to the Virginia Quilt Museum.  Of course they needed to have some screen printing, so I selected a few holiday images that I thought would work, and decided to print on some linen fabric for a natural look.   I cut 5 1/2 inch squares of the linen.  The screens I used were a vintage tree design made up of rows of birds, and a vintage pine branch that I combined with a bird.  I also remembered I had some wooden printing blocks that were trees, so I used those too. These are the initial prints.  You might be able to see that I drew a diagonal chalk line to help me center the image.  The top 2 are the screen printed designs, the bottom 2 are the block prints.

I had bought some embellishment products at Artistic Artifacts when I got this idea, so next I pulled those out to see what I could do to liven them up a bit.  One is a metallic thread, and the other is an embellished ric-rac trim, both made by Tentakulum from Germany.

On the block printed trees, I did french knots on the branches - they look almost like beads.  I used the ric-rac on the screen printed tree, and on the pine and bird design I made 2 french knots in the bird's beak to look like seeds.

The final step was stitching them together & stuffing, with a ribbon in the top corner for hanging.  I put the 2 block printed trees together, one on each side, and the screen printed designs together, one on each side.  Of course, you could easily put another holiday fabric on the back to make more ornaments.  Hmm...that's a good idea if I make more!