Fun Embellishing Christmas Ornaments

Have some fun adding dimension and extra pizzazz to your machine embroidery with embellishments. Whether you use paint, beads, or buttons, there are so many fun ways to embellish Bonnie’s Christmas Cookies! 

Make sure you take advantage of Bonnie’s fabulous Black Friday/Cyber Monday sale coming soon! In the next few weeks, I will be showing you some fun projects using one of my favorites Sew Inspired by Bonnie designs--Christmas Cookies.

Here are a few ways you can add embellishments to machine embroidery designs to give them more pizzazz and dimension, if you like. Maybe you'd like to make these designs freestanding for ornaments or play food for a Santa Plate? Find out how here.

Beads

Beads can add sparkle and extra dimension. Substitute tube beads for the cuff decorations on the mitten cookie. If you don’t want to hand-stitch them, just glue them on.

Crystals

Perfect for dotted areas like tree ornaments, crystals make ornaments pop. I’ve used hot-fix crystals as well as Swarovski.

They are also great to use for buttons and holly berries. You don’t need a hot-fix wand. I glue all of mine to the surface, using a toothpick dipped in glue to apply them.

Buttons

Buttons are fun to use on machine embroidered cookies. I find that it is easier to run a needle and thread through the button's holes and tie it off on the back, then glue the button to the ornament or machine embroidery, rather than trying to hand-stitch the buttons in place. This way it looks like you stitched the buttons in place when in reality you just glued them.

Just skip embroidering the button dots and add decorative buttons instead.

Paint

Stitched areas can be accented with paints. Dimensional paint, like Scribbles, is good for faces and other color accents used as piping on the cookies.

 For larger areas of stitching, like the white accents on the stars, you can even add a light layer of shimmer paint. Paints mimic the shine from decorator icing and just add a playful touch.

Trims

Try substituting ric rac for the swirly bands on the gingerbread cookie arms, legs, and heads.

I have also skipped stitching the bow on the little gingerbread girl and replaced it with an actual bow made of ribbon.

What is your favorite way to embellish Christmas ornaments?

Debbie Henry
Sew Inspired by Bonnie