It's a good thing I did that Mickey first, because had I started with Minnie, she would've been destined to be a spinster on my Christmas tree. Holy cow! I knew I was in trouble at this stage:
Look how tiny some of those pieces are! And because I'm a classic over-achiever where these ornaments are concerned, I decided to STITCH on the polka dots using 1/8" punched circles. I'm pretty sure it took over an hour just to cut the darn thing out! That might've been my first clue.
Once again -- lots of gluing on this, which is not my favorite thing, but the engineering was a nightmare and that was the only way to get the whole thing together once everything was stitched and stuffed. This seemed like it took a hundred years to make, but it was totally worth it:
The kids love them and can't wait to see them on the tree this Christmas. I saw Mariah thumbing through that Disney book as if she was looking to see what other ornaments she'd like me to make from it. I put it away somewhere that NO ONE will ever find it!
Several years ago, I was procrastinating about cleaning perusing ornaments on Ebay and came across this book of ornament patterns for Disney characters:
My first thought was, "That looks like it was made for Ouida and me!" A smarter person's first thought might have been, "Oh, look -- the directions are in Japanese!" I figured I didn't need any stinking directions; as long as I had the pattern pieces and a picture, how hard could it be? I don't even want to think about how many years ago that's been and the book had been in a drawer since I bought it.
Cut to this spring when two of our kids went to Disney on a band trip.
They had the time of their lives and I was caught up in a Disney frenzy. MUST. MAKE. MICKEY. ORNAMENTS. I dug out the book and got to studying. And I mean that seriously: studying. These patterns aren't for the faint of heart. There are a million pieces and most of them are tiny. There are diagrams, but no English text, so sometimes it was hard to tell what piece was what. The diagrams definitely came in handy. The ornaments themselves were quite small, too, so I enlarged them a bit.
The first thing I did was decide to do the Mickey first. I initially intended to do the pair, but thought I could potentially see the writing on the wall. If the first ornament turned out to be a nightmare, I might wave the white flat on the second. In my fantasy version of the future, my kids will fight over these ornaments after I'm gone and I figured they'd both like a Mickey, but Brayden might not like a Minnie, so I decided to do the Mickey and let them duke it out if the need be.
I'm not going to lie: this was a major challenge. But it was a good one. It was sort of like putting a puzzle together. There is more glue than I normally like, but I think we'll all survive. He turned out great . . . . so great, in fact, that I decided to proceed with the next ornament. Stay tuned for chapter two!
