Homemade Christmas

Back in 1978 I found instructions in a magazine for making Christmas tree ornaments out of eggs. It involved carefully blowing the centers out of the eggs, leaving them hollow, painting them, decoupaging pictures onto them and turning them into lovely, and surprizingly strong, christmas ornaments. I made a bunch every year for 8 or 9 years, putting the kids' names on some of them so they'd have their own personal egg ornament. I don't have many of them left because as each child has grown up and left home, they've taken 'their' ornaments with them. It's nice to visit them at Christmas and see these treasures on their own trees. Here are a few that I have left.

I stored them in styrofoam and cardboard egg cartons and discovered that in the humidity of Nova Scotia, the styrofoam and cardboard stuck to the eggs and ruined a number of them. Now I wrap them in tissue before storing them.

I used to look for Christmas gift wrap that had small motifs on it that I could cut out and use to decorate the eggs.

I had made so many eggs that one year our tree was decorated entirely with the eggs. One year a child crawled under the tree and knocked it over. Not one of the egg decorations was damaged (and neither was the child).

After awhile I used other mediums for my homemade ornaments.


There was the cross-stitched ones...

...and the knitted bells...

...knitted socks...there were also knitted mittens but I don't have any of them left...

...and beaded stockings....

There were also plastic canvas ornaments, thimble angels, and others, that haven't lasted through the years.

These days I prefer the old fashioned blown glass ornaments like we used to have on our tree when we were kids, but there's always at least one egg, one knitted ornament, and one cross stitch treasure hanging on my tree.

Traditions are great, especially at Christmastime.