Inspire Me Monday: Arabesque Ornaments

Happy Monday friends!  It’s Christine here to show you a sweet and simple little ornament you can create for your tree.  What’s fun about it is that you can make it more detailed, or leave it quite simple and it still has a wonderful effect.  

Did you see Marcy’s wonderful post about the design process with our new set Botanical Tree? Oh it’s so great, she talks about the development of this set in the arabesque style, which is such a wonderful way of illustrating.  Because of the detail of this set, it works perfect when stamped in a variety of ways.  I thought I’d show off three styles for these ornaments.  

For the first ornament I thought I’d go all out and colour it up.  I stamped the tree in Memento Tuxedo Black onto a 4 x 6 inch piece of XPress It Blending card stock, reversing the image back and forth.  

Next, I added my reds into the design giving colour to the roses and poinsettias.  

Then I added in a variety of greens to the foliage and lilies.  

Next, because I wanted the inside of the ornament to be pretty I coloured up the backside of the card stock with a B10 and B11 Marker to give it a blue hue.  

And then I added that same B10, B11 blue hue to the background of the coloured up side.  

Next take your 4 x 6 inch coloured card stock and cut it into 3/4 inch strips along the 4 inch side.  You’ll probably have a wee bit of a sliver of left-over card stock, you can just toss it.  I wasn’t interested in doing any math to figure out how to make it work out perfectly.

Line up your strips in a row, aren’t they pretty?  

Then, because I wanted the top of the oranament to have a finished look I took at small die cut circle in a coordinating colour and used my 1/8 inch punch to put a hole in the center.  

Gather all the strips into a pile and punch a hole in the top center of the strips, then add your circle and a brad to hold that side together.  Follow the same step for the bottom of the strips by adding a punched hole and brad there as well.  

Now you’ll have a stack that looks like this.  You can bend the strips slightly to curve them and then you’ll fan the strips into an oval strip by strip to form the ornament.  

Here’s how it looks!  So cute!  

And now you can see why I wanted to colour the inside of the ornament, just because you can see the inner strips too.  

Next I tied some simple twine around the top brad.  You could also add beads or tassels to the top or bottom of the ornament to really fancy them up.  

You can also use this set tone on tone to create a soft pretty effect as I did above with Pool Party paper and ink.  

Or, like this little ornament using white craft ink, and white embossing powder on red cardstock.  

Here’s my pretty trio hanging from my evergreen tree outside.  So cute, and even easy enough for kids to create too. They would be a great little addition to your Christmas tree this year.  

Christine