It is getting closer to Christmas and I am getting in the mood to start making ornaments. Been looking at various pieces of jewelry on Pinterest. As stated before, many of my ornament ideas come from pendants, earrings and other pieces of jewelry, especially if I am designing ornaments for a miniature tree. Sometimes, the piece can be enlarged to “normal” ornament size just by increasing the size of the beads, other times not and the enlarged ornament will need to be re-worked to include the additional use of beads. With an increase in the number of beads, also comes the increase in weight from the additional supplies.
Thinking about doing more of the wooden spool ornaments from last year, already have eight designs for people who are fans of the University of Alabama, and my godson will be ‘graduated’ from Mickey to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles which have been designed to make four different ornaments.
Over the years several people have received miniature trees from me and I have about four (4) 2-foot trees in storage that I thought about making with the possibility of selling. Usually each tree has 80 to 130 mini lights on them mixing both battery-powered as well as outlet, usually will use white lights. I will put about 100 miniature hand-made ornaments, 25 different styles with four ornaments placed around the tree. Most of the ornaments will be between 0.5 inch and 2 inches in height so that the ornaments are in scale with the tree. The first tree I made 10 years ago, had over 40 pairs of earrings mixed in with the miniature ornaments. Since then, I have been on the look-out for earring designs which I can make as miniature ornaments.
Have many old designs of miniatures from past years which I already have extra ornaments hanging up and have ‘discovered’ several more that can easily be turned into miniature ornaments. So the new trees would have enough variation of ornaments so each tree won’t look a-like. I try to make four of each design so that one can be placed on each quarter of the tree with two of them placed on the top half and two on the bottom half.
The only thing on the tree I usually don’t make is the tree topper, I will purchase a pre-made miniature topper but will add elements to it.
