Crocheted Wreath Ornaments

I believe I mentioned before that I was searching for an ornament pattern to crochet as Christmas gifts and after trying to come up with something on my own for about a week, I broke down and bought a book from JoAnn's. I'm a quitter like that.

Anyway, one thing about making Christmas ornaments that you have to worry about/deal with is starching your project so that it's stiff and hang-able.

What I do is take a plastic sandwich bag, spray some starch inside and put in the crocheted piece. Then you work in the starch so every part is wet, take it out and squeeze it between pieces of paper towel to remove excess starch.

For the next part, you'll need a surface that takes pins well. I used to have some cork boards that I used for this but they got lost in our many, many moves and so here I just used a piece of cardboard with plastic wrap taped over it (so the piece doesn't stick). Also, you can see that I drew lines on it to guide me but they didn't really help because the symmetry was a little weird (i.e. I had the lines in the wrong place!) - I hate wasted effort. And then I pinned the thing down in the proper shape - if you don't know what that looks like, here you go:



It'll only take a few hours to dry and then you can remove the pins.

And here's the final product (my apologies for the less than stellar pictures here - I am lazy, that's all I can say - Maybe Tammy can post a better picture of the finished product since she has one!):



I just used gold embroidery floss for the hanger and voila! A do-it-yourself Christmas present!