Primitive Snowflake Mitten Ornie

I've been a longtime member of the Prim Mart community (love it!) and have participated in their annual handmade Christmas ornie swap four about 4 years now.We make enough of the same ornie to give to everyone who participates in the swap. Sometimes there's a lot of participants--I've made as many as 40 ornies in the past. This year we made 26...a lot more do-able. But no matter how many participants there are, I always get excited to receive my box of handmade primitive ornies each year at Christmas time. 

I decided to do a mitten again this year, but wanted to do a different design than I'd done on my Primitive Heart Mitten Ornie for a previous swap in another community. I just always like to be sure that no matter what ornie I'm making for a swap, that it's an original that I've never made before. So this is what I designed for this year. (I posted this on my art blog already...hence, the Art Chick Studio watermark.)

I made myself a template out of cardstock first and cut two pieces of plain white felt for the mitten. Now, the prim 'n proper thing to do would have been to grungy up this little white mitten. And I did think about it for a minute or two...but I just decided that I liked the crisp, clean look of the white felt this time, so I left it as-is.

Once I had the mitten pieces all cut, I stitched them together around the edges using black embroidery floss, leaving the top open for stuffing. I just love the contrast of dark against light, and I think the contrasting stitching always helps make things like this a bit more primitive-looking anyway. Next, I took black buttons and sewed them to my rusty snowflakes using white embroidery floss. And then I just attached the rusty snowflakes to the mitten fronts using a rusty safety pin, and sewed on some black embroidery floss for hanging the ornies. The final step was to add just a wee bit of fiber fill to the mittens, to plump them up a bit.

I only had time for one ornie swap this year (sometimes I've done more than one because I belong to more than one primitive community), so I was so thrilled when my box of ornies arrived in the mail. My Christmas tree is now, literally, quite full of beautiful, handmade, primitive ornies, made by talented primitive crafters all across the U.S.--and even abroad! I treasure all of those ornies more than I can even say, and I love looking at them on my tree each year. And I have so many of those handmade ornies at this point, I am probably going to have to start putting up a second tree somewhere, because if I keep doing ornie swaps, I'm just not going to have anymore room on my tree! To me, this is a wonderful dilemma to have.