Embroidered trees

When I first thought of making embroidered Christmas cards my plan was to do Christmas trees. And I was only going to make half a dozen of them. It was only after designing the first six trees that I decided to add some variety and do some snowflakes as well, and then came the baubles and stars. At least it meant I didn’t have to come up with a whole load of other card designs.

The trees have the most variety of techniques on them. The baubles and stars were just straight stitch, but trees gave me the opportunity to add decorations. So we have baubles made of detail sparkle (glitter glue), French knots, and beads. I also did some couching to create the pink garland and used metallic thread for most of the stars on top of the trees.

I ended up making eighteen of this style of card, but, given how much work goes into each of the individual embroidered motifs, the only thing these cards have in common with batch-produced cards is that they share a basic design.

And while the felt pieces had to be stitched one at a time, that common design meant that I could prepare the rest of the elements in (very small) bulk. So, all the card bases were folded, the small card panels were cut, the sentiments were heat-embossed and cut out. Even the embroidery designs were printed out and cut to size.

That way, once I had finished all the sewing I could assemble them all at once.

I came up with most of the designs before I did any stitching, and I even went back and designed another six trees, though I didn’t need the additional ones in the end (maybe next year).