Our Christmas Tree with new satin topper star. Had to do the sofa shuffle to make room for this tree.
Merry Christmas to all my quilter friends. Hope you are enjoying your families and friends.
When I unpacked my Christmas decorations I couldn’t find the angel tree topper so used this white satin star ornament that I made last year from a center section of a wholecloth quilt -pattern from Sherry Rogers-Harrison called “Over the Moon”. We made the wholecloth in her class at MQS in Overland Park, Kansas in May of 2010.
To make the ornament I first cut off a piece of white satin about four inches larger than the finished star and hooped the center with stabilizer and selected a snowflake style round design on my Viking embroidery machine that fit the size of the center circle. For thread I used Superior Thread Silver Metallic. Then I centered the embroidered satin over the paper pattern design and traced just the star portion with the blue marker that is water soluble. I sewed the two pieces of satin together around the perimeter of the design and left a 3″ opening for turning and then pressed the sewn seams.
Pellon makes a stiff product called Pel-Tex which is what I used to make a star to fill the inside of the satin star. I did not iron it as there is an adhesive on the Pel-Tex (when you make this, iron the satin separately first). To make sure that it fit well I trimmed a very tiny amount off the shape and inserted it to make sure that it fit perfectly and hand stitched the star closed.
With white thread I first sewed the perimeter double lines on my Viking. Then I pinned the star to my APQS Millennium longarm machine and did the feathers since I am better at feathers on that machine than on my Viking. Little tricky with the star shape. Both machines stitched through the Pel-Tex nicely. Then I sprayed water on it to get rid of the blue marker and attached the blue ribbon.
Tree Topper Star is a longarm pattern stuffed with Pel-Tex and embroidered with a silver thread snowflake. Click to enlarge image.
To fasten it onto the tree, I used an empty paper towel roll strapped in blue painters tape with tabs to pin through into the satin backside of the star and then slipped it over the tree top branch. This is temporary and could be made of satin if I were to use it just as a tree topper again. Who knows where I will want to put the star next time.
Then in the last box of decorations I uncovered the wrapped angel in the clouds that you see in the day-time photo. Since this is a newer version of the one my folks put on their tree sixty-some years ago and it has been on all my trees, I wanted to keep the tradition going so put her below my new ‘Over the Moon’ star and she seems right at home in this new location.
Usually we don’t put up a large tree because we are traveling to visit our daughter. She was due to be here for the holidays this year and bake us lots of pastries, then she got sick and so far has missed the large tree surprise. Maybe she will come tonight with a sack full of goodies. I doubt she will wear all red with white fur trim but maybe she will wear her red coat and say ho, ho, ho, Merry Christmas.
dancingstitcher 