CHRISTMAS TREE CREATURES
“There is so much stuff that you buy at Christmas time, that it’s really nice to have some handmade decorations that you can get out of the loft year after year,” the designer Donna Wilson says, as she stitches up a handmade knitted decoration. We’re making them from scraps of felted wool left over from her other projects, but it’s also a use for that favourite jumper you put through a too-hot wash. “What I love about these kinds of projects is that you can also use up waste, as well as preventing buying more,” she says.
Wilson, who trained at the Royal College of Art, has run her homewares and clothing business for the past 16 years and is perhaps best known for her felted “creatures” – cute, almost abstract animals that she first created while she was a student. “People send us pictures of them from all over the world,” she says with a smile.
The decorations we’re making today are riffs on that theme. “I’ll make lots of these and put them on the tree,” she says. She shows me how to start: placing two pieces of felt together, facing inwards, we draw a shape – this time a leaf – and sew around the outside with a back stitch, leaving an inch gap at the end. Then we cut out the shape all the way around and turn the decoration inside out, sew a bit of contrasting wool or ribbon inside the gap, and stuff it with scraps of wool or fabric.
We’re chatting away as we stuff and sew our designs; something Wilson says often happens when she crafts: “Doing things with your hands like this is almost meditative; it really calms you down, which at this time of year, is often what we all need.”
‘Making things with your hands really calms you down, which is what we need at this time of year’