Tuesday, November 27, 2012

DIY Custom Ornaments Tutorial

On Sunday, we went and got my Christmas tree! I am a little obsessed with Christmas and love decorating for it. Yesterday we went and got another tree, so we have one upstairs and one downstairs, and I am in heaven! It smells amazing in here.

This is the first year I've had a full grown Christmas tree as an adult, which means I don't have a very large ornament collection. I bought a couple boxes the other day, but they're nothing exciting, and I really enjoy an eclectic array of random ornaments. I love matching, stylish trees too, but random is more my style.

So I thought this would be a good opportunity to make some of my own ornaments and here's a little tutorial of some that I made the other day.

They're super easy, and the best part is you can customize them however you want. I got the ornaments at Craft Warehouse. They are skinny, almost flat ornaments. Only cost less 6 bucks for a set of 4. You only see 3 here because I dropped one, so my narwhal never made it to the tree *sad face*.

Choose an image you want. I used this website for these ones. I copied the image, re-sized them in a word document and printed them out. Then I went in search for something round and the perfect size to trace a circle with. A jar lid worked perfectly.

Trace and cut along the line. I used mod podge and put glue on the back side of the ornament. Carefully place the picture where you want it. I noticed that if you moved the paper around too much, the ink would start to smear, so try to be deliberate in where you put it. Though after the glue dries, it isn't very noticeable. Once the paper is in place, apply more glue to the back of the paper. I had to go around the edges with my fingers to make sure that all the paper was sticking to the glass.

Take a wet rag and clean up any excess glue while it is still wet. I wasn't able to get it all, but once it dried I was able to scrape the little glue spots that still remained.


I love this technique because there are so many ways you can customize them. You can make any kind of ornament if you can find a picture of it. I'm happy with how they turned out.




2 comments:

Unknown said...

These are amazing! I love the images you used. Maybe we should do an ornament making craft club?

Whitney said...

That's an awesome idea! We definitely need to do that.