Making things by hand and Christmas have always gone together for me. My parents started a tradition of making cards by hand before I was even born, and from these projects I learned block printing, silk screening, and melted crayon printing, among other things. I've kept the tradition up in my own way, and not quite as consistently, but for the past several years I've sent out small paper mobiles made from old Christmas cards. (That will be another blog post - I have yet to get good photographs of them!)
I'm always left with wonderfully usable scraps. The smallest of these scraps go toward paper mosaics (lots of info on that in other posts), but I wanted to figure out how to use the larger ones. Aha! What about miniature Christmas tree ornaments?
Several years ago I purchased a little tree made out of wire from the fair trade store Ten Thousand Villages (check it out at www.tenthousandvillages.com). But even my tiniest of ornaments were really too big in scale to work with this 20-inch tree.
So in the fall of 2020 I designed some very simple ornaments in basic geometric shapes of circle, cube, and diamond. I used my Cricut die-cutter to cut the shapes and glued them together. For the cube and diamond shapes, I actually inserted a few grains of unpopped popcorn to add a little weight to help them hang properly. After they had been glued, I put a two or three layers of clear acrylic medium on them as well to seal and strengthen the seams.
I discovered some tiny beads I had purchased for something else that hadn't worked out, and they were perfect embellishments to add a little sparkle. I strung them on heavyweight thread that I inherited from a friend who was moving away - I think it's the kind used to tat into lace.
My tree was then covered in beautiful ornaments!
For the 2021 holiday season, I'm selling them in sets of 3 - one of each design. They come packaged in a tiny homemade bag with a custom seal. Please contact me if you would like to purchase some for your tiny, or regular-sized tree.