Make beautiful, unique, holiday greeting cards, and beautiful tree ornaments, with these quick ‘n easy instructions

Used Designs ..

Embroidery Design 01 - 02 - 03 - 04

First, choose your cardstock.  You can purchase blank cards at craft supply stores or specialty paper stores.  Purchase pre-folded cards, or make your own with a cutting mat, ruler, utility knife, and ….

…a colorful variety of cardstock and  decorative paper.  Art and craft supply stores have a large range of decorative paper, or you may wish to use gift wrapping paper to accentuate your cards.

Water-soluble stabilizer has the consistency of thick, stretchy, plastic wrap.  It is available at most sewing supply stores.  Hoop a piece firmly, making sure that it is taut, but not stretched.

If the stabilizer is stretched, it will tear away from the design as the needle perforates the stabilizer, and the design will become distorted.

After sewing the design, follow the stabilizer package instructions to remove the rest of the stabilizer.  Usually the instructions will tell you to soak the embroidery design in water for several minutes until the stabilizer is dissolved.  Allow the embroidery to dry, then press so that it is flat.  You can use starch to help flatten the design.  For ‘homemade’ starch, take stabilizer scraps and dissolve in a spray bottle - about 5 parts water to 1 part scraps.   

Sewing on water-soluble stabilizer is very fun, and you can use freestanding embroidery for ornaments, jewelry, pins, patches, and myriad other decorations.  If you notice that the pieces of a design are pulling apart while sewing, you may need to adjust your bobbin tension.  Ideally, when looking at a stich column (satin column) on the back side of embroidery, 1/2 to 1/3 of what you see should be bobbin thread. If your design is pulling apart, loosen your bobbin thread slightly - incrementally - until you achieve good results.  

Also, be sure to save your stabilizer scraps.  As well as using them for starch, you can iron the smaller pieces together between a piece of waxed paper to get a larger sheet

Cut your paper to the shape and size of the card that you desire.

You can add decorative touches using patterned, decorative paper, or gift wrap.  For this card, we used a Christmas-plaid paper and cut a frame.

We applied glue to the back of the frame….

and then pasted the frame to the front of the card.

Then, we took two freestanding embroidery designs and affixed them to the card.

We printed a holiday message, and cut it to be slightly smaller than the inside flap of our card.

You can affix a holiday message with glue, or….

Using a paper punch, cut two holes through the paper and card.

Thread ribbon through the holes.

Tie in a holiday bow.

For another card, we used red, velvet ribbon with a gold, iridescent border.  We wrapped the ribbon around the card.

Then we cut a piece of filament about 8 inches long, and threaded it through the top of the freestanding embroidery.

On the inside of the card, we wrote a message asking the recipient to remove the embroidery and use on a tree as an ornament.  It’s a great way to send a gift with every card!

Take a look at some cards that we made with freestanding embroidery.  This Candy Cane Reindeer is affixed to a piece of green paper and inserted into a “photo card” purchased at a film processing store.

Using holly-patterned paper, we cut a rectangle for the Gingerbread man, and then framed the card in matching paper.

This Christmas light is ready to be plucked off of ivory velvet ribbon and hung onto a tree.

A piece of gold tissue fabric was fringed on two ends and glued to a card.  Then we affixed the Three Magi design to the tissue.

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