Tutorial: Felt Gingerbread Ornaments

Has the cat eaten your baubles? Got a bare spot where you've taken the crackers and candy canes away on Christmas Day? These gingerbread shapes are so quick and easy to make and can be hung from your tree or strung together to make a garland. All you need is:

• A piece of thin card
• A pen
• Sharp scissors
• Felt in a tan/fawn/biscuit colour
• White/cream & Black embroidery thread
• Embroidery needles
• Soft toy filling

Fold the piece of card in half and draw half a gingerbread man shape. The will make sure your man is nice and symetrical. Cut him out and unfold him. (I'll happily provide a downloadable PDF of shapes should anyone want one)

Draw around your men on the felt, fit them as closely together as possible to make the most of the material. Cut out the shapes. The sensible person will now embroider one half with the design of their choosing. Give the man eyes, a nose and mouth and buttons (if you wish). I gave my man eyes and a nose and a belly button using a french knot.

Place two man shapes on top of one-another and start stitching together using a simple blanket stitch. Start at one shoulder and work all the way around to the other shoulder leaving the head un-worked.

Now for the fun.

Grab a small hunk of filling and tease it apart in your fingers to fluff it up. Start to fill your man. I found that using the end of a crochet hook helped to fill the extremities.

Sew up the head, secure the belly button on the back of your man with another french knot and slip the needle up and out of the top of your man's head.

Make a loop and secure.

Thread the loop with ribbon and hang your man in the tree.

Make other shapes too, hearts, Christmas trees, stockings and stars will all work well. Use them as little samplers for trying out different embroidery stitches. The stitch below is rosette stitch which looks like gorgeous icing dribbled all over a cookie.

So have a go, I guarantee you that making these charming ornaments is about ten times quicker than this post took to construct. Thanks Blogger!

The Humans are Dead

Hiyar.

I'm back from holidaying in the exotic lake district. I feel like a bad blogger, like i should have blogged as soon as we got back this weekend, but i needed to settle back into the boredom of being at home and "the gotta" for sharing.

We spent a lot of the last week doing various walks along craggy hillsides and mountains. It's not really necessary to share all my holiday snaps since most of them are of me doing this face:

at the top of a lot of different mountains and hills. The bad news is that the wind changed at the top of Cat Bells and now i'm stuck this way. My boss is not pleased. He has to look at this every day. Hubster says it's an improvement.


Because of the improvement i made to my countenance whilst walking the fells, i received a lot of presents from dearest hubster. I didn't get him anything (bad wife) but i bought us a new tent so that we won't be cold and wet next time we camp in the lakes. I think that's priceless really. Our current tent leaks.

My Hubster knows me better than anyone. He knows all about my quirky taste. Hence i ended up with three of the things that would please me better than anything else on earth.

A pet Ninja and a pet Samurai. Almost any japanese style gift is always a winner.

Tattoo themed journal/notebook. Tattoo themes are also a winner. I have a japanese leg sleeve tattoo with rats on it. That's three of my very favourite things combined (tattoos, japan, rats). Can you guess how much i love my own leg? An unhealthy amount. I would probably lick it if i was bendy enough.

Novelty crochet book of AMIGURUMI ROBOTS. Japan and robots! I am one of those people who makes true knitters uncomfortable. One of those crochet-knit hybrids. More on these delightful crobots soon.

I can't wait to crochet one of these little suckers. I've been working far too hard on "serious" projects these past few weeks. On that bombshell, it's time for me to go and steam my face straight. Good day!

Going on our Jollys

We're off to the lakes again. Aren't we lucky?

Back in a week :)