Sewing Handmade Christmas Ornaments

When it comes to holiday sewing, there are so many fun different little projects that you can do but it can get kind of overwhelming if you're trying to do a lot of sewing at your machine, trying to find time to maybe do some sewing around the holidays. So it's a lot of fun to have some sort of quick and easy hand sewing projects that you can do, you know, maybe at night watching TV or something and they whip up pretty quickly and easily. So these are some really cute little felt ornaments that can also be used as gift tags. So again, you could either hang this on your tree as an ornament, or maybe on the back of this you can write to from maybe attach these to your gifts as you're giving them. But again, they're really quick and easy to make. So all of them come from these little patterns here and this is available to download and all you would do is cut out the shape and then cut them out of felt and sew them together. So I'm just going to show you some quick and easy tips for how to construct these and sort of how to embellish them and make them your own. So again, all these are made out of felt. They're all pretty small. So I honestly just have lots of scrap felt that I have used for other projects in my stash. You can see, I just have cut sort of little sections off of them. From one sheet of craft felt, you can make dozens of these little ornaments, so no need to run out and buy a lot of felt if you have little scraps. That's more than enough for these projects. So all of these are put together using blanket stitches around the outside edge, which I will show you. And then a couple of them have some beads as embellishments. So first I'm going to show you how to attach the beads to your, this is a little sugar cookie, this is pretty cute. So we would have our pieces cut out here and you can see I have sort of my frosting section and then two pieces of cookie section. So we want to attach our beads to this first, that way any knots or any threads are on the back, we don't see them once this gets put onto our actual cookie. Now, when you're putting beads on, you can use any kinds of beads you want. This is a pretty small piece for the project. So you want fairly small beads but you can use these little seed beads. You can use ones that are sort of these longer beads here, anything you want. And for me, I don't do a lot of of beading. So I don't have necessarily beading needles or special thread for that. But what I do recommend having just on hand for any kind hand sewing is just a huge collection of hand sewing needles, because a lot of different needles they come in different sizes. The opening, the eye of the needles are bigger or smaller on a lot of needles. Obviously the lengths differ quite greatly. And I don't always know what size of needle is going to fit through the bead that I get. So if I have a large selection of needles to pick from I know that one of these in here is going to fit through whichever bead it is that I pick. So I'm going to pick just a few of these little ones here that I'm going to put on my shape. And I'm just going to put them out on my felt, just a few that way, and then close this back up so you don't have beads rolling all over the place. But so what you want to do is you want to come up from the back side of your felt with your thread, wherever it is you want to put your first bead and pull it through, but not all the way. So you can see, I have my tail here. This has a knot on it right here and I haven't pulled it through all the way. The problem with using a thin thread like this and pulling it through felt is sometimes it will pull through the fabric, even if you're tying a fairly big knot. Sometimes that happens. So rather than tying knot on top of knot on top of knot to try and make it big enough, what I'm gonna do is I'm going to leave my tail out a little bit. I'm gonna go back down through the top of my felt just fairly close to where I came out, pull it through. So now I'm on the backside, and I want to just grab my thread. I'm going through the loop here of where my knot is. I'm gonna grab that. I'm going to pull it tight. Now this way, I know that my thread is secured by wrapping it through that little knot that I'm not accidentally going to pull it through. Now I can bring it back to the front side of my little piece here, anywhere that I want. And I can start putting my beads or my little sprinkles in place. So I can pick up a bead, make sure that it goes, the bead goes over the eye of the needle. That would be your sticking point if you've picked a needle that's too big. And bring it down. Now the little seed beads are a lot easier to put on because they're just teeny tiny little beads. Obviously these have a little bit of length to them. So what I want to do is push the bead to the surface of the fabric. So I know how long the bead is. Have it going in whatever direction I want it to be going in. And then put my needle down just inside the length of the bead and pull it through. This way, I know that my bead is going to lay flat on the surface. The thread is going to be hidden on either side of the bead. You're not going to see long thread coming out if you make your stitch too long. You'll actually see your thread on either side of the bead. And you don't want that. You want the bead to be the star. So now it doesn't really matter where you go from here. You have a long enough piece of thread. You can bring up your needle anywhere you want your next bead to go. Pull it just taught, pull it too tight you're going to bend your project over. So just taught on the back. Pick up another bead. So again, make sure it's going to go over the eye of your needle, bring it down, close to the surface so it's tight. Put it in whichever direction you want it to be going. And then go ahead and put your needle back through your fabric, just inside the length of the bead and go ahead and pull it tight. And can you see, even with this lighter thread and the darker bead, I don't see thread on either side of it because of how I'm doing that stitching. Now once you get done putting however many beads you want on the top of your piece, you can flip it over to the backside and we're going to tie a knot. You can do this really any way you want. My preferred way is to find a length of thread and put my needle underneath it. I now have this big loop of thread here. I'm going to pull it a little bit smaller, loop my needle underneath it or through it, and then just pull it tight. And I'm just going to do that a couple times. So again, I'm going underneath my thread. I'm finding my loop, putting my needle through it like so and then pulling it tight. You don't have to do a whole lot of knots to hold these beads in place. This piece of felt is going to be layered on top of another piece and there should really be no stress on these beads. So no worry about having to tie extra thick knots. You would then just take and you can either glue this little guy in place. You can do some hand stitching around the outside edge. Maybe the running stitch is simple, a basting stitch around the outside edge to secure that. And you'd be ready to put our layers together. And I'm going to show that in just a sec but just like this one goes together, just like all of these around the outside edge is a simple blanket stitch. So you can see along here, we have this little stitch lines along the outside of our little ornaments. All of these are put together with a blanket stitch. So for the blanket stitch, you want it to sort of stand out a little bit more. It's more of a decorative stitch than a running stitch or a back stitch is. And so you want to use a thread that's a little bit thicker. So what I've done is rather than using two or three thicknesses of a regular hand sewing thread I'm actually going to use some embroidery floss so it stands out a little bit more. I'm also going to pick a color that slightly stands out from the color of the felt that is being used. So just like felt comes in a huge variety of colors and it's fairly inexpensive embroidery thread does too. You can buy tons and tons of these little things of embroidery thread, usually just under a dollar a piece and have thread that will match any type of felt that you buy. So again, you'll have your length of embroidery floss. And when you take off your piece of embroidery floss depending on the brand or the style, it's usually several strands all entwined together. Usually it's around six strands. Now you can absolutely decide that you want to use all six strands when you are doing your hand stitching but sometimes that's just a little bit too thick. And so you're going to need to separate those strands apart. So to do that, all you really have to do is sort of roll it in your fingers. When you're looking at your strand, you'll be able to see that it's either twisted to the right or the left. And when you roll it in your fingers you want to sort of roll it the opposite direction so it starts to unravel a bit. And you can see how easy it is to sort of pull these strands apart. So I'm just separating two strands off. And as you pull it down, you kind of want to pull slowly and keep twisting. So what I'm doing is, as I'm pulling this down, I'm again twisting it in the opposite direction that it is all entwined together. That way it comes apart easily. If I didn't twist and all I did was simply grab the two ends and just pull them apart. The further down I get I'm just going to get a really big knot. So I want to do it kind of slowly and just twist as I go working my way down the entire strand, separating it out. Again, do that until you get however many strands that you want to use. I like to use two. And then when I run it through my needle like this one is here, I double it, put my knot at the end and then I have four strands together. So again, a quick and easy way to just separate that apart. Go ahead and thread your needle, use as many strands as you want, and you're ready to go. So no matter what shape that you're using of the patterns available here, you're going to put them together using a blanket stitch. So because I have a fairly large knot at the end, I want to bury my knot somewhere between my layers of felt before I get started. So to do that, I'm just going to take and do sort of a stitch, but I'm only going through the top layer of this piece of felt. You can see my needle does not poke through to the back. I'm just grabbing a couple of the fibers from the top, pulling it through. And this is just so my knot sort of stays put somewhere in the middle and I don't have to see it anywhere on the outside edge. Now I'm going to start and do my blanket stitch. I like to start by coming through the back first and then up towards me because I find that it's a little bit easier for me to see where my stitches are going, but so I'm going to bring my thread up first, sort of get started. Now I'm going to again go and come up from the back so I can see where my needle is coming up, bring my thread up until I have just a small loop. And then I'm going to put my needle down through the loop, grab that thread and pull tight. And you can see it's going to have a little bit of that thread that's going to come along the outside edge and be sort of on top of the outside edge. And that's the actual blanket stitch part. So again, I'm going to go from the back to the front, bring my needle through. I'm going to pull the thread until I have just a little bit of a loop there. Put my needle down through the loop and go ahead and pull tight. So I'm pulling just until that thread lies right along the edge of my fabric. I don't want to pull too tight because that will sort of warp or wrinkle things. Do that one more time. You're coming from the back, through to the front, got a little loop, put my needle down through that and I can pull tight. You can see I'm just forming that little blanket stitch all the way along the edge. So this is the stitch that I recommend you use to put together all of your ornaments or tags. You see I've done that on all of this here. And just like that, you can have a simple easy holiday either project for an ornament or project for gift tags that you can put together while you're watching TV at night, whip up several of these pretty quick and easy and really get into the holiday spirit with quick and easy felt project.