Seasonal Heraldry: Crafting Christmas Crest Decorations for Your Home

Christmas decorating has been borrowing from heraldry for centuries. The deep reds, the gilding, the evergreen swags and the long feasting all sit comfortably beside a coat of arms, and a Christmas tree is, in effect, a small display of family identity hung from the branches. If you have arms in the family, or even just a monogram you like, a few evenings with clay, felt and a brush will give you decorations that mean more than anything in a supermarket box.

The projects below use materials you can find in a craft shop or stationer, together with the heraldic detail that stops a decoration looking like generic festive clutter. Start with one charge you love and build outwards.

Read the Blazon Before You Cut Anything

Heraldry has its own vocabulary, and knowing a handful of terms will improve every ornament you make. A full achievement includes the shield, the helm, the mantling and the crest that sits on top of it, but for decorations the shield is almost always the strongest shape, because it carries the design clearly at small sizes.

Before you draw a template, write down what you are working with:

• Field: the background tincture of the shield.
• Ordinary: a band such as a chevron, fess or bend dividing the field.
• Charge: the main figure — a lion, a stag's head, a martlet, a fleur-de-lis, an oak sprig.
• Tinctures: metals are Or (gold) and argent (silver); colours are gules (red), azure (blue), sable (black), vert (green) and purpure (purple).

Then simplify. A shield with three martlets, a chevron and a border will turn to mush on a six-centimetre bauble. Choose the single charge that carries the most meaning, keep the field colour behind it, and save the rest for a larger project such as a stencilled table runner.

One rule matters more than any other: metal never sits on metal, and colour never on colour. Gold on red, silver on blue, black on gold — these read instantly. Gold on silver looks like a mistake, even to people who have never opened a heraldry book.

Air-Dry Clay: The Simplest Crest Bauble

Air-dry clay is forgiving, inexpensive and needs no kiln. Roll it to about four millimetres — a couple of stacked pencils either side of the rolling pin make a handy guide — then cut round a card template.

1. Draw a shield, roughly 6 cm by 7 cm, on thin card and cut it out.
2. Roll the clay, lay the template on top and cut round it with a small knife, keeping the edges upright rather than pressing them flat.
3. Press a design into the surface while the clay is soft: a small rubber stamp, the back of a pendant, or a cocktail stick for a simple charge.
4. Make a hanging hole near the top with a skewer, about 3 mm in from the edge.
5. Leave to dry for 24 to 48 hours, turning once. Sand any rough edges with fine paper.
6. Paint the field first, let it dry, then add the charge in a contrasting tincture. Finish with a matt or satin varnish and thread a narrow ribbon through the hole.

Bare air-dry clay will drink moisture from a warm room and can crumble over a few seasons, so seal every ornament before it goes on the tree.

Salt Dough Shields and Spiced Ornaments

Salt dough behaves like a stiffer clay and takes stamping beautifully. Mix plain flour and table salt in roughly equal parts, then add water a spoonful at a time until the dough comes together and stops sticking to your hands. Knead it for a couple of minutes, rest it, then roll and cut exactly as with clay.

Two things to remember. First, salt dough ornaments are decorations, not biscuits: the dough is far too salty to eat and should be kept well away from small children who might try. Second, dry them slowly. A low oven with the door ajar, or a warm airing cupboard for two days, gives a better result than a hot bake, which cracks the surface.

For a spiced look, add a spoonful of cinnamon or mixed spice to the dough. It tints the ornaments a soft biscuit brown and scents the box they are stored in, which is a pleasant surprise the following December.

Felt, Thread and Shrink Plastic

For something that will last, felt appliqué is hard to beat. Cut a shield from a wool-blend felt in your field tincture, then cut the charge from a contrasting colour and stitch it down with a close blanket stitch. Gold and silver are the trickiest tinctures to sew, so use a metallic embroidery thread for small details rather than hunting for a metallic felt that will not fray.

Shrink plastic offers finer detail. Draw or trace your charge on the rough side with pencil crayons or a permanent marker, cut it out with a generous border, punch a hole and shrink it in the oven following the packet instructions. A ten-centimetre drawing reduces to roughly a third of its size, which makes shrink plastic ideal for wine glass charms, small tree decorations and the tiny shields that sit above place names. Always punch the hole before shrinking.

A Crested Christmas Table

Table decorations take crest motifs well because they are seen from a distance and repeated. A row of napkin rings, each carrying the same small shield, does more than one elaborate centrepiece. Try these:

• Napkin rings made from the cardboard tube inside a kitchen roll, cut into 4 cm bands, painted in a field tincture and stamped with your charge.
• Place cards shaped like small shields, with the guest's name on the front and a monogram on the back. If friends have arms of their own, use theirs — it is a quietly flattering touch.
• A table runner in plain linen or hessian, stencilled with a repeating row of shields in gold fabric paint.
• Wine glass charms in shrink plastic or stamped metal, one tincture per guest so everyone can keep track of their glass.

Keep the palette tight. Two metals and two colours carried through the whole table will look deliberate and confident; six colours will look like a jumble sale, however good each individual piece is.

Finishing, Colour and Yearly Storage

Paint is where most home heraldry succeeds or fails. Use a proper gold or silver acrylic rather than yellow and grey, and apply two thin coats rather than one thick one. Matt finishes suit flat, bold charges; satin suits anything with metallic detail, because a high gloss throws so much light that small shapes disappear.

When the season ends, store the pieces properly and they will outlast the tree. Wrap clay and dough ornaments in acid-free tissue, pack them flat in a rigid box with a sachet of silica gel, and write the blazon on the back in pencil — field, charge, year. That note takes ten seconds and settles an argument in twenty years' time.

Begin With One Charge

Choose the single element of your arms you like most — a stag's head, a cinquefoil, an initial on a shield — and make six of one thing before you attempt anything complicated. A batch of clay baubles painted in gules and Or, a set of felt shields for the tree, a run of stamped napkin rings: any of these is an afternoon's work and a lifetime's decoration. Heraldry rewards repetition, and Christmas is the one time of year when a house full of shields and gilding looks entirely sensible.

Photo: Sergej ***** / Pexels