A Hand-crafted Christmas Item

This is one of my favorite decor items that I have made. I did this many years ago and bring it out each Christmas. I followed something that I found in a magazine, so no credit to me for the idea. Anyway, The tree is embroidered using a chain stitch and zig zag stitch on my ordinary sewing machine. My machine came with about 4 or 5 different stitch possibilities, and I used these two.

I took a square of plain fabric and pieced together the border in blue around the square. Then I ironed on some interfacing to the backside to keep the fabric stiff for machine embroidery. Using a piece of chalk, I drew the outline for my primitive tree on the fabric, overlapping onto the border slightly.

With brown thread in the machine, I used a wide, but tight, zig zag stitch to create the trunk of the tree, periodically making the width of the stitch narrower as I ascended the trunk. Switching to forest green thread and changing the stitch to a chain stitch, I used both forward and reverse stitching to create primitive branches on the tree, and some needles along the trunk.

Once the tree was complete, I added a "pot" out of a square of print fabric that it attached with a tight zig zag stitch.

The ornaments and tree topper are buttons sewn to the plain fabric. I stitched on gold thread for the "hangers" for each ornament.

Finally, I made edge-piping out of red and white striped fabric on the diagonal, then sandwiched that in between the front and back of the pillow and stitched 7/8 of the way around, turned right side out, stuffed and hand-stitched the opening closed.

I share this idea because I think the primitive tree design, without ornaments, could be used to embellish a plain fabric for a table runner, napkins, or plain stockings for the holidays. It's simplicity is charming, IMO.