Holiday Ornaments: Part 2

So the Holiday season has come and gone yet again. I may have been quiet on the blog the last few weeks, but we sure have been busy crafting, party planning, and decorating! I'll have lots to share in the coming weeks.

I figured it would be best to start with the second half of our ornament project. I had held back on blogging about them because the Disney themed ones were a gift for my family. Crafty Kid had a great time making these and I was glad I came up with the idea because they were easy to make as well. We really loved making the spiral paper ornament! It was a lot of fun to do and such a beautiful result.

For this craft you will need the following:

• Double sided scrapbooking tape
• Mickey scrapbooking paper (or character of your choice)
• Paper Slicer or sharp scissors
• Q-Tip or a pencil
• Styrofoam or Epson salt (if you want to add "snow")

The first round of ornaments Crafty Kid and I were having trouble deciding what looked best inside the ornament. Some of our issues were that in order to get bulkier items to stay we needed glue, which was difficult to use due to the small opening on the top of the ornament. The paper items often just fell on their side and again gluing them to the wall of the ornament was a bit of a process. Not to mention only one side of the paper had a print on it so if it flipped over it just looked like white paper.

We had some scrapbook paper with larger sized Disney character faces on it, and luckily before we went to use it I had a breakthrough. I realized we could glue two of the characters together so there was a design on both the front and the back. In the ornament above we cut out two of the Mickey faces and glued them together with double sided tape. Then we rounded off the edges with a small, sharp pair of scissors.

We then put the double sided Mickey paper inside the ornament. We were super happy to see it stood up inside the ornament. We had some packing styrofoam I saved, so we broke it into pieces to put inside the ornament to create a snow globe effect. Crafty Kid really LOVES her glitter glue so she put some drips of it on the outside of the ornament.

For the Minnie and Pluto ornaments above we followed the same initial steps. Once the Minnie paper was inside the ornament we used Epson salt as snow and Crafty Kid dotted the top with white glitter glue. For the Pluto ornament she decided she wanted to dot the entire ornament and leave just the Pluto paper inside.

This ornament above is hands down my favorite! We were messing around with some smaller strips of scrap paper and came up with the idea to spiral it. I showed Crafty Kid that she could use a Q-Tip to roll up the paper and she ran with it! We used a couple different shades of silver paper. I cut the thin strips and she rolled them up. Some we stuck inside at that length, others we cut to different lengths. It came out so pretty.

Note: We put some glitter and flat white gems inside. I don't think it's necessary. You can barely tell unless you look very closely at the bottom, which is where they sank to. That's the beauty of the paper is it's so light as a spiral it has a floating effect.

So as promised from my previous Holiday Ornaments: Part 1 blog, above is my melted snowman Pinterest fail. Mine, of course, is the one in the right hand corner. Honestly it doesn't look as bad as I remember, but it still wasn't as cute as what I saw on Pinterest. 

Just goes to show that not all craft projects are as easy to replicate as you think. That's why when I blog I do my best to go step by step. I hope it's helping those reading with some ideas and inspiring you to craft on!

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.