Homemade Ornaments

by Melanie

If someone celebrates Christmas, chances are pretty good that they are going to have something in their home from which ornaments hang, whether it be a full tree in all its potential splendor, or a space-saving garland for those less invested in the large-scale festive. That being said, ornaments are a good bet for simple Christmas gifts for anyone, and if you make them yourself, it is a great way to both keep things cheap, and to keep things creative and personalized.

One of my favorite basic materials for making homemade Christmas ornaments is to get sets of clear glass (or plastic, if there are going to be young kids involved either on the making-things end or the admiring-the-tree-end) bubble ornaments. These can be purchased as craft supplies (especially the plastic variety), and, depending on what you have around the house and how creative you are, they might end up the only supply relevant to this project that you actually need to purchase. Carefully remove the tops from the ornaments and your creative options are suddenly not restricted to what you can do to the outside of them. Pick a color scheme for each friend and drip paint -- standard, pearly, metallic, or with glitter added yourself -- into the hole, rotating the ornament to let it run along the inside surface of the bubble, continuing and layering colors until you get a sealed-inside glossy paint job visually reminiscent of pottery glazes. Let the paint dry before putting the ornament’s cap back on. Use snowflake-shaped stickers on the outside (either keep them there, or remove them to leave a neat design of glue to roll on some glitter), fill with water and glitter, and glue the cap back on very well! Fill with scraps of garland, jingle bells, crumpled pieces of wrapping paper or fabric, ribbon, or anything else that would look pretty. Kids especially have fun with that last version.

Really, the possibilities are almost endless. If you can find a version of the ornaments with caps that screw on, you can even make a sneaky combination present – for example, you could use paint pens to add frosty artwork of penguins or polar bears or frolicking elves to the outside of the ornament, and fill the inside with “snow” that is really white chocolate cocoa.

Here's some other great easy homemade gift ideas.