You’ve stitched a lovely ornament. Now you want to make it easier for you, or your finisher to turn it into an ornament.
What do you do?
The first step is to be sure that your ornament has a stitched border if you want the entire focal point to show. Most ornaments are finished with twisted cord around them. Some designs, such as the Mr & Mrs ornaments at the top of the post, have the focal point away from the edges so a border is not needed.
The rest of the time you will want to make a 3-5 stitch wide border so there is a margin for finishing. Some canvases helpfully have this drawn on the canvas for you. As a result you can just fill that surrounding area with Tent Stitch or T Stitch. The rest of the time you need to add it yourself, as I did with this Christmas light, below.
But you can take this process a step further to make it even easier to finish. That’s because the simplest shapes to finish are squares and rectangles. That’s because the corners on them are all outward-facing corners, like a L. Inward-facing corners, like a V, are harder to finish cleanly.
You can make your finisher’s life easier by smoothing out those inward corners to make the outline less fiddly. In fact when you see something like the ornament below, I’ve done just that putting the cat into a domed frame that’s much easier to finish.
You don’t have to turn your ornament into this regular a shape. Sometimes it’s enough just to fill in those corners a bit.
You also don’t have to make every ornament into a shape with corners, rounded shapes are slightly more complex than squares and rectangles because the margins need to be clipped to make a smooth curve, but they are still easy to do.
If you use T Stitch for the margins and plan your outline to make it easy to finish, you’ll find you get lovely ornaments where all you beautiful stitching shows up nicely.
About Janet M Perry
Janet Perry is the Internet's leading authority on needlepoint. She designs, teaches and writes, getting raves from her fans for her innovative techniques, extensive knowledge and generous teaching style. A leading writer of stitch guides, she blogs here and lives on an island in the northeast corner of the SF Bay with her family
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