Notre Dame Football Ornament
Making Your Own Pattern
Often I’ll decide I want to make an ornament I don’t have a pattern for, so I’ll create my own. A roommate that i made this for was a HUGE Notre Dame fan. Like to the point of autographed footballs on top of the TV. So I thought she might like a Notre Dame Football Christmas Ornament.
1) find inspiration. I looked on google for pictures of footballs and her team’s logo.
2) Make sketches:
Here you can see the “composite” image I decided to go with, having the football with the simplified logo
3 & 4) Trace into patterns & Cut
Trace template onto cardstock pieces, one for each piece of felt I need to cut, also trace templates for where the embroidery goes.
Then using the cardstock templates, cut the felt to match.
5) Do a lot of stitching
Here you can see some soft pencil lines where I am embroidering “seams” onto the football. Mostly I did the sewing while we watched Christmas movies.
Finished Product
After all the sewing and embroidery. It came out pretty much like I was envisioning. You could pretty much take this same idea and swap it for any other football team
Another example: Funshine Bear
I used a jpg picture of funshine, scaled to the size I wanted as my template. Funshine was the very first ornament I made from my own pattern. The embroidery on the belly worked really well. The tail and tuft of hair on the top is such a cute touch, but was a little tricky to attach as I was using yarn (the same yarn pictured at the bottom of the picture that is supposed to look like a light fluffy cloud but looks a little thin and more like a rats nest). Funshine came out a little skinny, because when you stuff the ornament, the appendages get narrower and more round. Only carebears are supposed to be kind of big and furry, so all the “tube-like” dimensions would have came out better if I’d compensated by adding a 1/4 or so to all the “skinny” dimensions for fabric for the depth. That and a lot of the seperate pieces don’t show up as detail very noticably so I might as well have cut the whole front out of one solid piece rather than individual limbs (other than the bottom of the foot on the front which really does need its own piece for appearances) But I was still pleased with the ornament none the less. I was really surprised how quick this one went together too since it was really the first small one I’d done that didn’t have lot of sequins and only minimal embroider that does not inclue any big cheek circles.