I love the Christmas holidays and since childhood have made my own Christmas decorations. In the past I’ve played around with using embroidery to make tree decorations but I could never really solve some of the technical problems that presented themselves. However this year I‘ve been trying a new approach
The bird and star are straightforward appliquéed and embroidered designs, made with hand-painted fabric and stitched onto a normal medium-weight calico. I stitched one side of each design, then mirrored it and stitched that, and then glued the two halves together. I used “Paverpol” but you could use any kind of thick PVA glue. The advantage of this kind of glue is that it’s transparent when it dries (so spills don’t matter much) and it also makes the embroidered fabric hard and rigid. If you don’t have any PVA to hand you could probably use any kind of fabric glue, although you might have to sandwich a piece of cardboard between the two pieces to make them stiff enough to hang. If there’s any white showing along the line where the pieces join, you can cover it up with a dab of paint. The bird’s wings are just made as a separate piece in the same way, and then slotted into place
You could add sequins or crystals or little gold or silver ornaments to these to make them sparkle, but unfortunately I don’t have any to hand (and we’re snowed in yet again so I can’t go out and get any). So this will have to do
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