Ho, ho, ho, Xmas is coming

No need to panic yet as there is lots of time still to do your shopping, decorate the tree, send the Xmas cards etc. But I'm early this year, making Xmas items in my capacity as a member of the Alphastamps Design Team.

Leslie from Alphastamps send us some yummy Xmas goodies to make Christmas related items with and I got started today.

I thought about it long and hard and came up with the idea of a star ornament for in the tree. I used my Electric Quilt 6 computer program to come up with a pattern for a star. The size is 6", so not too small nor too large. I printed it out and traced it onto Fast2Fuse and cut that out into a star shape. I grapped some fabric which I had hand painted quite some time ago, with acrylic paints and stamped with gold acrylic stars. I traced the star shape onto the fabric twice and cut these out.I added stamping using the Alphastamps stamps that Leslie had included in our kit and stamped the Ho, ho, ho and small Santaclaus images onto the fabric star, using a Colorbox Gold Dye-ink stamppad. I left the stamping to set and after some time had passed, set the stamping by ironing. I ironed on one fabric star onto the Fast2Fuse star (following the manufacturer's instructions). Onto this side I added a paper image from the Alphastamps Snug in their Beds collage sheet with machine stitching (using a gold thread), also stitched around the stamped star and finished by beading around the edges of the image. I decorated further with more stars in the shape of sequins which I held down with a size 11 gold seed bead.

The other star fabric was also further decorated with a Santa picture from the Alphastamps Health & Wealth Xmas collage sheet. I only used a detail from one of the images, figuring a slightly snozzled looking Santa. He too was stitched on with gold metallic thread and again I added the star sequins as above so that the 2 sides would have something in common. I then added this fabric side to the other side of the Fast2Fuse by ironing and finished off the edges with gold satin stitch on my machine. Make sure you have gold thread both on the top and in the bobbin so the stitching is gold on both sides. Finally I added an eyelet, using my Crop-a-dile and laced through a gold ribbon, which I knotted at the top.

Does it not look lovely hanging in the tree. We have a lot of ever-greens in the garden so it wasn't difficult to come up with this picture!