Christmas Ornaments

I make different ornaments each year to give to Anna and Alex as well as other special friends and family.  This year I settled on woven stars; and Amanda over at House Revivals has a really great series of tutorials (which I followed very closely).  She makes hers out of old book pages, but of course I used fabric.  I recently inherited a bunch of Christmas prints, and I thought this would be a perfect use for them.

The ornaments are really not difficult to make, as Amanda said, the most time consuming part is making the strips.  My strips were all 6 inches long and either 1/4 or 1/2 inch wide.  I wasn't sure whether fabric would be stiff enough, but I think it worked ok.  Each strip is four layers thick: I folded 1.25 or 2.25 inch strips in half, then in half again (like you would for a purse strap only without interfacing) then sewed down the middle.  I assembled them with fabric glue and used mini binder clips to hold the corners down.  I tried a bunch of different variations and had a lot of fun.  My ornaments weren't quite as dimensional as hers were, I think because the fabric was so flexible, so I sewed a stack of four beads inside to hold the two sides apart and make them feel more open.

They're all 8 pointed except the one on the bottom right.  I thought I'd try to do one that was 6 pointed, but I didn't think it through quite right and wound up with 12 points, too many strips, and difficulty in assembly; thus only one like that!

This one had extra layers of weaving.  I like how it looked (in fact I kept this one) but it didn't line up quite right and turned out to be kind of a pain to make so I only did one.