Above you see the finished snowman off the stretcher bars with the items I'll use to make him into an ornament. The black grid pieces are plastic canvas. Two pieces are cut slightly smaller than the outside dimension of the actual snowman NP. The tan pieces are acid free foam called Fantasticfoam, which is used --among other things-- in finishing. It comes in sheets like the plastic canvas does. I cut it to the same size as the plastic canvas pieces and there are two of those also.
The last item is a piece of gold lame fabric. It's tissue lame, pretty thin, and the wind moved it in the photo. You can see it is frayed a bit at the edges, which is one reason why it is much larger than the piece of needlepoint, even including the outside unstitched margins.
What I did last night was to layer the fabric, padding foam, then plastic canvas and wrap the two inner pieces like a package, turning my wide margins of gold lame to the back and stitching them in place with sewing thread. Then I layered my needlepoint with the foam next to the back side of my stitching, then the plastic canvas behind that. (In either case, the foam is trapped between the needlepoint (or fabric) and the plastic canvas.) The needlepoint isn't as wide or flexible as the gold lame fabric, so I folded the edges over to the back around the inside layers and laced them in place, with a doubled strand of sewing thread. You end up with two halves of an ornament which can be sewed or glued together. I sewed mine, going around the outside edges and whip stitching them together, making sure everything lined up. Don't forget to put a loop hanger between the layers as you sew because this is a Christmas tree ornament that needs something to attach it to the tree!
This makes a fat sandwich with edges that are around 3/8 inches wide. That's wider than the normal ornament edge width I get but I wanted to try finishing this way to see how it turns out. I actually have a little pillow with the snowman on the front and the gold lame on the back. I'm not sewing trim around the edge to hide the join and make the snowman more decorative. I am having a bit of trouble with the trim because I didn't have anything the right dimension. All my trim and cord and braid was either too skinny or too fat. I solved that problem by doing two trims around the margin--I'm currently sewing a wired gold trim I bought at the fabric store around the edge. When I finish I will couch another trim in front of it--the smaller blue Snow thread that made the background. That will hide the join better and look pretty with blue and gold together.
I am not finished sewing the two trims on yet, but should finish that tonight to show off the finshed piece tomorrow. In the meantime, why don't we go over to NC Pat's blog and see her put her Janet Z. Casey Santa ornament together? She uses a somewhat similar finishing technique and gets great results which is why I wanted to try this style of finishing. I don't normally finish the front and back of an ornament as halves of a whole that need to be fitted together. Remember, this is a blog. You'll need to scroll down past part two to find "Let's Finish the Santa Heart."
http://needleartnut.blogspot.com/
Main blog at http://blog.360.yahoo.com/chillyhollow
2 comments:
I am glad this worked for you! Since I am not overly fond of sewing machines--and they don't care that much for me either--I use this a lot on the odd shapes!
Using the craft foam makes the two sides very pillowy, if that makes sense. If you don't want a raised look to your NP, you will want to put something else inside besides two layers of craft foam. But it is easy to use and comes in a lot of colors. I may just glue it to the back of my next piece instead of putting it inside the NP and the backing fabric.
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