Making a Beaded Christmas Tree Ornament, and GG report for April

I can not believe the speed at which 2016 is passing. Already it is time for the April Gited Gorgeousness report.  I have been stitching away all month, and have made good progress on my stitching goals.  I finished the first row of pages of Christmas Dreams (pic is in the post immediately below this one), so I have now finished 6 of the 66 pages.  The chart, fabric, and most of the floss for Christmas Dreams was purchased with birthday gift money.  I have also stitched but not yet made up seven Christmas ornaments.  Two of them were beaded Christmas trees, and as several people have commented on my trees, I have taken some progress pics to show how I make them.  A word of caution - I now have a huge plastic box of assorted beads in my craft room - so don't get involved with these if you're frightened of adding another stash addiction to your life.

I start with a framework for my tree.  These days I usually use smyrna cross stitches (over 4) fr the tree, as they stitch up quickly and I like the look of it.  Then I add a pot for the tree (I always try to make the pots different). I don't have a particular formula for stitching the tree - I just let my needle play.  These are the two trees I started with for my ornaments this month.

The next thing I do is add some feature beads or perhaps tiny buttons.  I just anchor a double strand of floss on one side of the tree, add beads to the floss, anchor it down on the other side of the tree with a small double stitch, then from the back of the work, put in some tiny couching stitches to make the beaded floss sit nicely.  So, at the end of this stage my trees looked like this:

No hard and fast rules, but for these trees I alternated strands of stars separated by beads with strands of graduated beads.  Mine are always symmetrical (even when I deliberately try to have a more casual look),  I always think I will stop at this stage, but by now I'm in beading frenzy, so I never do!  My next step is to fill in the empty spaces with beads.

 I stitch backs for my ornaments, because I make them up by  hand stitching them.  So, this is what I have now:

The purple tree is a Christmas gift for a dear friend, and the golden tree is a Christmas gift for my youngest sister.  I will be making them up in the next week, so I will put up pics of the finishing process in my next blog post.


I also stitched a Baby's First Christmas ornament as a Christmas gift for the newest member of my extended family. The teddy design is a freebie from the DMC website.  I changed all the floss colours.

 And I stitched Santa alphabet ornaments as Christmas gifts for four young family members.  I have yet to add the beaded border to Sarben's ornament.  The Santa alphabet design is adapted from LA's Alphabets Galore (1998) booklet.  I filled in the holes in Santa, omitted the tree, and changed all the floss colours.  I also made a few changes to some of the letters.

And that's me done for this report.  I look forward to checking the blogs of GG participants.  I always enjoy all the lovely pics.