Garden Pic Wednesday: Memory Ornaments

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Our Christmas tree, a live Frazier Fir, is decorated with memories.
(the photo is of our Christmas tree this year, 2018)
When my sisters and I were kids, beginning when I was about 10, we started getting fancy pin ornament kits in our Christmas stockings.
These kits contained a pattern for decorating a foam ball and all the pins, sequins, bits and ribbon to create it.
Many were spectacular designs back then.

I was talking on the phone with Mother about this and she remembered it all got started because my younger sister got an ornament kit on her birthday a couple months earlier.
After that, we were hooked and got a new kit every Christmas.

 When I left home and was in the Air Force, I continued ordering these kits every year for myself from Wards craft catalog.
Mother said she didn't know that.
So, today I'm going share a few photos of ornaments I made after I left home:

 This little Santa in a Chimney pin ornament is a fond memory to me because it was the first ornament I ordered for myself from either LeeWards or Herrschners to do for Christmas, 1976. 
It just has sequin "bricks" on the chimney and red sequins on his chest and body.



I didn't just order pin ornaments. One year I found these cute little crewel embroidery ornaments: this Santa and also Snowman I had to cover with stitchery. 
It has 1979 stitched in black on back.  I must've added the date later, because I remember actually doing the crewel stitch work in my Air Force dorm in Nebraska.
I probably actually put them together and stuffed them in 1979.




This fancy red Pin Ornament is one of several kits I recall putting together while I was stationed in Turkey.
There were a total of 4 kits I made that year. I probably ordered them in November to work on through Thanksgiving and Christmas. I was living in an apartment off-base in Adana with another girl then.




This last one, which is a pretty aqua blue with blue silk flowers on top and bottom, was the last of the truly ornate designer pin ornament kits I ever purchased.
 I can't remember where I got it exactly. I think at a craft store, since LeeWards closed in 1994.  I got it just before the super fancy designer pin ornament kits went out of vogue for awhile and I actually didn't put it together for a good while. It moved with us to Florida and I put it together here. 



One thing about doing these kits, though, is you end up with tons of leftover pins and beads of every kind and sequins of every size and color. So, later in life when we'd visit home for the holidays, Mother would pull out the box of foam ornament shapes and all those do-dads to fix them up and my hubby and I and sister Pat and Mother would sit around the table making our own original pin ornaments.
I have a few of those on my tree as well and that's what makes them special.

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I looked up pin ornament kits online, if you're interested in making a fairly fancy pin ornament kit, you can look up Herrschners online.
They're still in business.

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