Happy Halloween everyone! It's the time of year to pass out candy and get excited for the holidays. It's also the time of year for me to prepare for my Christmas craft fair season. So I've been busy making ornaments for my shows and taking pictures of them for my website.
I've been making chainmail Christmas ornaments for a while, but they haven't made it to my website until now. Being a seasonal item, they always seem to draw the short straw when I do website work. But that changes today! I just finished adding a whole new section to my site with six different ornaments available.
Each design is special to me and I'm excited to have them all finally online. Some of them have been with me to many of my shows, and others are new. I hope to add even more options in the future, but here is the current roster:
Double Barrel Spindle. I've been making this ornament for years and it's one of my most popular designs. It's long and dainty and beautiful. I call it Double Barrel since that's the weave used in the centerpiece. It's a variation of the European 4-in-1 weave with accent rings on either side. In this case the accent rings are festive red and green. That's joined to mobius units at the top and bottom and finished off with a little spike. I think the most interesting thing about this ornament though is that my husband was the one who designed it. He occasionally likes to make suggestions on new product designs for me, and they're usually good ones.
Caged Tree Ornament. These ornaments are my variation of the classic ship in a bottle. The clear glass ornaments have little chainmail Christmas trees inside. How did I get them in there? I'll tell you the secret: the tree can fold up quite a bit. So I made the biggest one that would fit through the neck of the ball, crammed the tree in there, and then gave it a little shake to open it up. It wasn't even the hardest part in getting this ornament ready. The hardest part was photographing it. The clear glass ball reflected back everything!
Hanging Garland. This ornament is a design I came up with. It's a drape that hugs the ornament ball using two different chainmail weaves: Nested Persian at the top and sides with Spiral weaves connecting the two. I thought that it looked a lot like Christmas garland with green and gold rings, so that's where the name came from. I also made them up in an elegant blue and silver color scheme. There are two different sizes for these two color patterns.
Japanese Ball. This is one of my newer ornaments and it's so fun to make. The thing looks like an absolute mess until it comes together in the end into an organized sphere. It's called a Japanese Ball because it's made with the Japanese style chainmail weave. Some people have told me that they look like atoms too. This ornament is fully customizable on my website with tons of options for the large and small ring colors. You can even select a rainbow design!
Snowflake and Poinsettia. This is another one of my favorites. The ornaments are made with rubber and aluminum rings. It was a new way of using the rubber rings where each one is squished through a tiny chainmail ring and then folded in half. The other thing I love about these is how a simple change in color makes them look like a completely different ornament: snowflake or poinsettia. It's still the same exact pattern, just the colors are different.
Chain Wrapped Ball. And last, but certainly not least, is a glass ball ornament completely covered in chains. This ornament came about after a customer specially requested the design. I liked it so much that I decided to add it permanently to my collection. It uses over 300 rings, and it took a lot of trial and error to figure out the best numbers in each row to fit snugly over the ornament. The example shown uses silver aluminum rings over a matte glass ball, but I have lots of different colors to choose from.
Come see me at next show! The craft fairs are a very different atmosphere from the comic cons and board game conventions that I spend most of the year vending at, but I still love going to them.​
​Nov 23, Dedham, MA: Dedham Jr. Women's Craft Fair
Dec 14, Framingham, MA​: Framingham Rotary Club Craft Fair
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