Thursday, September 6, 2012

Handmade fabric Christmas ornaments on sale now!

Sewn and beaded fabric Christmas ornamentsSewn and beaded fabric Christmas ornaments
Double-sided Christmas ornaments -- one side a variety of green fabrics, and one side matching red fabric!

My mom and I have opened an Etsy store! We're selling Christmas ornaments that we designed and sewed together. I'm very excited because this is something we've wanted to do for a while. The ornaments are being sold in sets of three: a dove, a tree, and a bell. Each ornament has a fun detail like beaded eyes for the dove, beaded "ornaments" on the tree, and an actual bell on the bell!

As long as I can remember, my family's Christmas tree has been decked out with dozens of this type of ornament, all made by my mom. Doves, trees, bells, stockings, candy canes, little crocheted ice skates and snowflakes, and more. The ornaments are practically family heirlooms now. 

When my sister got married and moved into her new house, my mom and I worked together to make her a set of her own. Which got me thinking -- maybe other people would like them, too!

So I designed some templates in Adobe Illustrator and we got to work creating prototypes. I came up with the idea of doing two different sides to the same ornament, so folks could choose to have a matching red set hung on the tree or a variety of patterns on green fabric. The bell shape went through a few iterations before we settled on that shape. I finally learned a bit of sewing :P. 

I even did a little portrait of my mom and a bit of illustration for the store banner!

 


There aren't a lot of sets on sale. My mom might be retired, but she is very busy with quilting, ping pong, and birdwatching. These sets were created in a the lull of late summer when the birding isn't that great, ping pong hasn't started up yet, and between quilt meetings. She's also getting pretty heavily into Breaking Bad. I bought her the first season on DVD and she is always laughing at it and shaking her said, saying "More troubles, more troubles...". Hopefully when she gets around to the episode in which my art appeared she'll be impressed! Probably not though, eh? Moms are like that :).

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

These look great Julia!

Julia Minamata said...

Thanks! Hope they sell well :).