Holiday Ornaments: Part 1

It's that time of year to make the Christmas ornaments. This is the third year the kids will make homemade ornaments for the family. I have to admit the two prior years I picked the projects and I kept it simple and fun. This year with Crafty Kid being so interested in crafting I let her help me pick out items at Michael's that we would use to decorate and fill our ornaments. I have to take advantage of what little time is left where I am "cool step-mom" and she wants to spend hours on end with me seeing where our creativity will take us.

Below are a list of items we picked up to use. Other than the ornaments themselves this is just a suggested list of decorative items you can use:

• Ornaments (plastic is best for kids to work with)
• Punch outs (Star, Snowflake, Heart)
• Scrapbooking paper
• Glitter
• Epson salt (looks like snow!)
• Crafting glue (dries clear)
• Glitter glue (silver, gold, & white)
• Embellishments

We chose clear plastic ornaments that were flattened so the items didn't have as much room to move. However round, square, or any size plastic fillable ornaments would work for (most of) these projects.

I had found some Mickey Mouse scrapbook paper on sale for $.07 and thought it would be fun to use different punch shapes with this paper. I started to punch out the paper and realized filling the ornament was going to be very hard to do. Since the paper had a white backing this made for a great snowflake cut out. I decided to glue some of the snowflakes and some carefully cut out Mickey's to the inside of the globe. Through trial and error I found that crafting glue (for foam, wood, or plastic) works best as it dries clear. I used a Q-tip instead of the brush in the glue jar, as that was too messy, to put the glue on the cut out paper. I then put the cut out on the top of my pinky and carefully put it inside the ornament. Each time before the glue would dry I would swirl the glitter around so that it would stick to the sides. Hopefully you can see in this last picture that it turned out great once the glue was fully dry.

While I worked on my Mickey ornament, Crafty Kid was up to her own projects. She really loved using the glitter glue as you can see below. She thought it made everything look nicely "frosted". The glitter glue bottles were a $1 a piece find. Go figure it was her favorite thing after all the money we spent! (LOL) The Epson salt we are still deciding if it's as cool of a "snow effect" as we want. Full disclosure that we originally wanted to make "melted snowmen" but that didn't turn out as nice and easy as what we saw on Pinterest. I might share my "fail" with you in the next blog. (Hence part 2 of Holiday Ornament's coming soon!)

Below are some of the ideas we came up with using what we had on hand. It's always great to save what you can from previous projects. Those yellow flowers and the red cherries are left over from when I made my Mary Poppins hat!

Hope you enjoyed seeing some of the things we made. Stay tuned for Part 2.