Sunday, December 20, 2015

Wehrheim Family Ornaments 1997 - 2006

Decade three - more of our collection of handmade ornaments. 


The idea for the 1997 reindeer ornaments came from a Christmas lapel pin that I saw.  We stained wooden cutout hearts and glued them together to make the reindeer. Then added google eyes, a pom pom nose and a little holly decoration.

1997 Reindeer Hearts
 My brother, Ron, and his wife, Sue made a cute little birdhouse ornament for Dad in 1997.  We liked them so much we recruited them to make one for everyone in 1998.   Ron made the birdhouse and Sue painted them.   So cute!
1998 Wooden Birdhouse
For the 1999 ornaments, we raided Mom's button box.  Dad trimmed down the craft sticks for us to make these cute Christmas trees.  It was fun going through all the buttons Mom had collected over the years.  She would never throw away a worn our garment without taking the buttons off to use again.  Bet she never thought they would wind up on family Christmas ornaments.

1999 Button Trees


In 2000, we three sisters spent a weekend in Grafton IL and among other things worked on these cute little gingerbread men.  The heart is cut out of the felt and a piece of red fabric is glued behind the opening. 

2000 Gingerbread Men
These spool snowmen were the ornaments for 2001.  We got together at Jane's house again - I think - and put these together. 

2001 Spool Snowman

I found some cute nutcracker designs in a cross-stitch magazine and we stitched those on plastic canvas for the 2002 ornament.  We wanted one more design so I charted out one that looked like a wooden soldier.


2002 Nutcrackers
2003 also found us stitching on plastic canvas.  The stocking design was stitched on plastic canvas and them trimmed to the shape.  We glued these to craft foam and then cut around in a stocking shape.


2003 Plastic Canvas Stocking
In 2004, we decided to do these tall Santas on a bag type ornament.  We found long peppermint sticks to put inside.   We each did some of these and chose the colors to use so they were all different.  That summer I taught our niece, Jill, to cross stitch and she made several of the ornaments. 


2004 Santa Bags
At our Christmas 2004 gathering, Kelly showed us another idea she had found. Dominoes were stamped with a snowman design then colored in the detail with a permanent marker.  We agreed that Kelly needed to make these for the 2005 family ornament.   They don't hang from the tree (although you could add some sort of hanger) but we couldn't pass up dominoes.  Our family plays a lot of games and dominoes is always a hit.


2005 Snowman Dominos
I found the design for these Santa clips (clothes pin glued to the back of the canvas.  We each worked on our ornaments throughout 2006.  When we were almost done we realized that Jane was using a smaller count (larger squares) of plastic canvas so the ones she stitched were twice as big.  So we decided the men would get the larger ones and it worked out perfectly. 

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