Individual baubles - all done

Way back in early 2012 I was playing with making fine crochet lace covers for Christmas baubles and decorating them with ribbon roses to create an olde worlde / Victorian style Christmas decoration.  I kept it all quiet and hush hush because at the time I had a couple of other makers that seemed to be copying everything that I did and undercutting my prices so much that they clearly weren't making any profit on them whatsoever and I didn't want them copying this idea.

I put this idea to the side for a few years and all of a sudden fast forward 5 and a half years and I have been making more of these baubles on and off over the past year but again keeping it all quiet.

I have made three different styles of baubles.  One is a bauble that is completely covered in fine crochet lace of different designs, usually made in two halves and joined to each other around the middle and then decorated with ribbon roses and the second is a crochet lace cover that only covers part of the bauble, all of the designs are the same but in all sorts of colours and decorated with ribbon roses and beads hanging off the points of the crochet lace. The third type was very simple, using Twilleys Goldfingering like I did for the boxes of 6 baubles, and I made just two of them to finish up the baubles.

Trying to enclose a bauble in crochet lace is not easy, trying to keep the bauble inside the partially joined pieces whilst crocheting the pieces together is tricky, not to mention trying to crochet around a solid object without the free space that you would normally have to work in is awkward too.  There was no need to glue the cover to the bauble on these designs as the crochet cover is stretched over the bauble and stitched to itself.  The covers with the hanging beads were easy to create but then I had to attach the beads.  At first I was using special beading wire, which is actually like a thick nylon thread but this was problematical for me and quite stiff and then I changed to dental floss, which gave the same strength but was more flexible.  Don't worry, it was a brand new one that I bought from the Chemists specifically for the purpose and no teeth or dentists were hurt in the making of them.  These half-covers are actually glued to the bauble to keep them in place.