Christmas decs with bells on!

Time is marching on and dare I say the words.....Christmas is coming! You may remember me saying the other day that we picked up a strip of material from Paulines Patchwork which had squares of little Christmas pictures on. We weren't at that time sure what we were going to do with them but we bought them anyway!

So we sat down on the sofa with them in front of us and pondered! We banded around idea's between us. We knew we wanted to turn them into Christmas tree decorations and the first discussion, was do we use a picture on the front and one on the reverse or just one on the front? One on the front only meant of course you could make twice as many! Me being a Northerner, this two for one appealed to me!

Then we thought about the backs....what to do? We could do plain red or plain green but we thought that was a bit boring! Then we had a eureka moment! Around the edge of the pictures was a larger square of co-ordinating patterned material. If we cut the surrounding square into strips, we could then use the strips, coupled with our plain material (cut into strips) and sew them together lengthwise, creating a striped effect - genius! Then if we turned them slightly, we could achieve a diagonal effect on the back too which made an interesting look.

Next ponder was over whether we should add bells? As you see from the previous blog entry this created great interest to my friend's cat Mojo! We decided that bells made them more Christmassy as did the addition of our homemade, Christmas spice! I wish I could say I liked the 'scent' but I'm afraid it just reminded me of mulled wine and I don't like that much either!  
 

 

The funniest things about making these? Mojo, who insisted on being in on the act! And me, who gleefully took the pinking shears to the edges of these creations and making an extra effort to remember to move the ribbons out of the way...and then looking in amazement when I managed to chop straight through the ribbon that held the bell on!!! How on earth did that happen? Followed by a whoopsie-daisy! And so as always, out came the stitch unpicker! Once, just once, it would be nice to not have to unpick anything!