Ornament of the Month 2021 - January

Welcome to the first Ornament of the Month for 2021! As you may have seen in the FB group, I was too exhausted yesterday to also finish stitching the ornament as well as write the blog post. I have done the stitching today — at a slower pace that I was trying to do yesterday. I'm still very tired, but I also want to get this done, so you aren't waiting any longer. Things have not been fully finished yet, and I still need to write the tutorial for the finishing of the main shape, but I'm afraid that will have to wait till I have a bit more energy — it will be done before the end of the month. There is a LOT of information in this post — it should answer many questions you may have.

The main shape is three interlocking squares which can be rotated in two directions depending on what you want to do with it. Like this it will make a lovely pendent ornament, rotated 90 degrees it will be a great garland part. I'll be making mine into a garland, I'll show you how in the tutorial.

Of course not everyone wants to deal with the more complicated shape of the main shape, so I have designed two corner sections to square it up and make it a more conventional shape, which is easier on the busy or newer stitcher.

Of course if you make yours on perforated paper you can make any shape you like quite easily!

One thing you may notice is that in the pattern I show French knots while I personally use beads, I do this as another way to offer options. Of course if you wish to do neither then using some sparkly thread to do a cross stitch instead will work well too, all the beads have been placed in such a way that you can do them as a cross stitch instead.

In the corner sections some beads are added with an XL X rather than with a single stitch, if you are doing French knots you might prefer to skip the X's.

The corner sections will be the same every month — the only difference will be the colour you stitch it with — I will give the corner section pattern now in case you wish to stitch ahead (using the 2015 colours), but I'll also be giving the monthly pattern with and without the corner sections so if you don't stitch ahead you won't need to worry about translating a grey scale pattern to colour.

You can find the corner sections pattern here.

These are the threads and beads that I used. Like in 2015 I am using the Birthstone colours. I'm using the same dark and light threads I used in 2015, but I'm replacing the backstitch colour with a Kreinik — you can either pick which one you wish to use with the threads yourself or wait for the monthly pattern to see which one I used. From left to right: DMC 814, TOHO TR-11-250 “Silver-Lined Garnet”, DMC 816, and Kreinik #4 Very Fine Braid 003. If you choose to only use DMC then replace the Kreinik with 815 this month.

You can find the main pattern here.
You can find the square pattern here.

Not only that, but you can find the layout for doing twelve main patterns with the same fabric for the back here.
In addition, you can find the layout for doing twelve square patterns with the same fabric for the back here.

I'll be back on Tuesday with the first post for the Sampler SAL!