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24th Card for Christmas 2010

Ornaments

Snow-covered evergreens standing in the woods are merely trees. Once decorated, they become Christmas trees. Over the centuries people have adorned their Christmas trees with many different kinds of objects. The very earliest ornaments tended to recall the religious significance of the holiday. At one point people decorated their Christmas trees with good things to eat and gifts for one another. In more recent times Christmas ornaments have served primarily as pretty decorations for the tree.

Sometime around 1870 a new fad in Christmas tree decorations began. Instead of decorating the tree with gifts and things to eat, people began to buy commercially made decorations designed solely for use as ornaments. Most of these early commercial ornaments came from Germany.  Early German designers fashioned novel ornaments out of tin and wax. In the city of Dresden, artisans specialized in making ornaments
out of embossed and painted cardboard. Only some of their designs featured Christmas symbols. They also crafted numerous ornaments shaped like fish, birds, ordinary and exotic animals, or recent inventions, such as the steamship and the motor car. In 1878 artisans from Nuremberg devised thin strips of silver foil that could be strewn over the tree’s branches like icicles. They called the thin strips engelshaar, which means “angels’ hair,” but we know them today as “tinsel.” German printers also adopted recently invented color-printing
techniques to turn out thousands of color illustrations of Christmas themes. Popular designs included angels, St. Nicholas, and the Weihnachtsmann. People collected especially pretty images and began to use them to ornament their Christmas trees and, sometimes, even to decorate their Christmas cookies.


Materials Used:

CEF - Asian Bundle: Lantersn
Stamp image - unknown
Sentiment stamp - unknown
MS Edge punch - Picket Fence
Panduro printed cardstock
Crystal beads by slojd-detaljer

Copic Markers:
skin - E00, 35, 53 and R00
hair - E33, 35, 53
denims - B12, 45, 93
sweater - G000, G00, 21, YG63
shoes - warm grey 3 & 4 (promarkers)
ornaments - BV13, 63, VR02, 07, 16, G14 plus promarkers Apricot, Meadow Green, Cyan, and Agean

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