TREE CHIC: A time for Branching Out
When it comes to decorating Christmas trees, there is the usual: red and green balls, angels, silver tinsel. And the unusual: fat frogs wearing pink tutus.
The unusual can be credited to
artists and craftspeople who reject the pedestrian red and green scheme and put their own spin on holiday ornaments. They see no reason trees can’t be adorned with blown-glass vegetables, or multicolored yarn pompoms the size of softballs. These alternative ornaments help express a unique aesthetic during a holiday that is celebrated by millions, but at the same time is intensely personal.
Unusual handmade ornaments can be found all over the area, from major department stores and little boutiques to museum gift shops, stores that feature handmade gift or home decor items, or even art galleries. Many of these shops feature work by local artists and artisans.
Among those is Susie Bauer, for whom mass-produced ornaments or traditional red Christmas stockings would never do. Her taste leans toward funky ‘50s style, so she makes small felt stockings shaped like whimsical pointed-toe, heeled boots, some accented with pompoms, in un-Christmasy colors such as aqua, heather blue, charcoal and rust.
“I’ve always tried to make Christmas fit my own personal aesthetic,” she says. “I want my ornaments to go with objects I have already. I just find it funny that for Christmas, people change their personal style and throw Christmas on top of it.”
Bauer, co-owner of the San Fernando-based stationery company Rock Scissor Paper, was inspired by the fabric itself: “I’ve been seeing felt a lot in home decor, and I was downtown in the fabric district and saw all these great colors of felt. The woman asked me what I was going to make, and I said, ‘Christmas stockings,’ and she said, ‘There’s red and green over there.’ But I always look for something that’s a twist on tradition. Instead of designing the stocking like a sock, I thought it would be cute to do a heeled boot, since boots are so big this season.”
She finds that making ornaments (she’s up to 50 felt boots so far this year) also cures her of holiday burnout: “In the stationery business, Christmas is pretty much 11 months of the year, so I try to do something that brings back the Christmas spirit for me.”
The monotony of mass production doesn’t even get to her. “My car was stolen the day I started, and I made [them] that day as therapy. I had so much fun.”
Cindy Rinne considers her quilted star ornaments experimental canvases for her larger art quilts. On this small scale, the San Bernardino-based artist and quilter can try out new collage techniques and materials and “use little-bitty precious scraps of fabric and yarns that are left over. I use antique kimono silks and lames and organdies and antique buttons.”
Her first ornaments were leftover rectangular pieces used to embellish one of her quilts. Not wanting to discard them, she added a loop so they could embellish a tree. Heart and star shapes followed. Rinne suggests that since they can be mailed, they can be ornament-card-gifts in one.
And they’re not just relegated to one season: “People hang them on their walls all year round,” she adds. “I met a lady who bought several of the hearts and was wearing them. One was on a hat, the other was on her shirt. I was so thrilled.”
Artist and photographer Liz Quesada of South Pasadena filled her need to “create something” by making metal ornaments featuring photographs, pictures, beads, words, stamped images and sometimes even fortunes.
One ornament features a fuzzy black-and-white photo of a dapper gent on a loteria card and reads: “You will participate in a gala affair.”
She works with pieces of found metal, transforming each into unique mini-artworks: “I never like anything in its pristine condition, so I have to scratch it up or paint it and scratch it some more.”
The fuzzy photos she sometimes incorporates have an almost dream-like quality; Quesada says she used an old plastic lens that diffuses the image. Besides hanging on trees, the ornaments have also graced walls and doors and ended up as jewelry.
The process can take months. “I have tons of scrap and photos that I take, plus old postcards. It’s a puzzle; you have to work to put them together.”
Brad Hudson never intended his bouncy yarn pompoms as Christmas ornaments, but they now adorn small silver trees in the windows of Plastica’s stores on Hollywood near Vermont and on 3rd Street near La Cienega.
The Otis College of Art and Design grad student bought a pompom making kit online last spring, originally to make little yarn balls for a wall-sized mural. But he quickly got hooked--he took a liking to them “as the objects they are,” eventually making 1,000. Some he kept, some he gave to friends.
“It hadn’t occurred to me at first they could be ornaments,” he said. “They were like something an artist does in his studio. When I was making them, people would say, ‘Are you insane? Where did you buy those?’ They couldn’t believe I could actually make them.”
When he decided to turn them into ornaments, Hudson offered them to Plastica. “None were intentionally made as a Christmas color, they’re all different colors and very bright and fun.”
Besides hanging them on a tree, he suggests grouping the pompoms in a bowl, gathering them into a bouquet, or using them as package decorations. Some customers have even used them as hair accessories.
Something about these pompoms is strongly reminiscent of those handmade lanyards, potholders and knitted scarves of childhood. “People come in and say, ‘I used to make these!’ ” Hudson says. “I hope they want to buy them, but if they know how to make them, they should definitely go out and do it.”
