What I've Been Working On: 15 years of Handmade Christmas Ornaments

One year my mom decorated her entire Christmas tree in pink and silver.  Another year, she and my sister spent a couple of hours hot-gluing real candy to the branches of their live tree.  They didn't even bother getting the ornaments out that year. 

My theme, on the other hand, is always the same- handmade eclectic!  Every year I make a new set of ornaments to put on our tree.  The old broken ones get tossed and the new ones get added.  I let the kids put up the tree.  The only thing I do is hand out the ornaments so they can't rummage through the box and break things.  Our tree will never be magazine-worthy but we love it!

I thought I'd share some of the ornaments we have done over the years.  These are sort of in chronological order.  (Most of them aren't dated.)  All of these are handmade but not all by me. We do have a few store-bought ornaments on there because one year my sister complained that we didn't have enough "sparkle" on the tree and proceeded to buy us a set of ornaments the next year (even after I told her that I only wanted to use handmade ones).  I put them up so as not to insult her.  It's not worth fighting over...

Anyway, here they are (be warned, this is long):

I'm pretty sure this is our oldest ornament.  Rock made this in scouts years ago.  It's a coke can.  They cut the top off and then cut the sides of the can into strips and curled the strips around a pencil to make a wreath.  Hmm, one of these years I might have to make these with the kids... (Yes that's hubby's picture in the middle, wasn't he cute?)

I made this when I was a teenager.  One of my few attempts to tole paint.  I quit when I decided I wasn't going to get any better!

I worked in a ceramic shop the year after graduation.  That's when I made these cat ornaments.  There used to be some reindeer as well but the kids broke all of them.  I loved painting ceramics...

This one and the next were made of styrofoam balls wrapped in scraps of fancy trim and sequins.

Pompoms and hot glue.  What more can I say?

I was a huge Garfield fan when I was young.  These were made of shrink plastic, using pictures from a Garfield coloring book.  The kids always fight over these two.

When we first met, Rock sent me a dozen roses at work with a poem.  (We got married 6 weeks later.)  I dried the roses and put them in 3 clear plastic bulbs and added some ribbon trim.  I think these are my favorite ornaments.

We were pretty poor after we first got married so I made these origami stars out of wrapping paper and glitter glue.  Most of them have been crushed now, but I still have a few.

Mom knew we didn't have money for ornaments that first year so she and my Grandma made me these huge styrofoam and colored plastic wrap lollipops.  The kids have destroyed all but this one and it's in pretty sad shape too.

These were the first ornaments I made with the kids.  We drew all over some aluminum foil with permanent markers and then carefully wrapped the foil around styrofoam balls.  Added a hanging loop and a ribbon and we were good to go.

Ahh, my frogs.  My sister loves frogs so I decided to make ornaments for her one year.  I loved them so much I made a set for myself.  They are made out of craft foam and hot glue.

Mom made these ones.  Glazed ceramic, decal flowers and silk flowers on top.  They look breakable but they really aren't too bad.

I did an ornament exchange with a bunch of women on my favorite homeschooling message board one year.  This one was my favorite.  I don't know how she knitted such tiny stuff but I love them!

This one's a little goofy looking but I was in charge of weekly activities for the 8-9 year old girls at our church one year.  We made these angels out of the old-fashioned clothespins, wired ribbon, lace, pipecleaners and other stuff.  They had a lot of fun making them.

And, of course we can't forget the beaded ornaments.  These were actually made over several years.  Some of them are woven and some are made with pipecleaners.  I made a few, mom made a few, and mother in law made some of them- even my daughters made some!

This one's woven.

Beads, lace and pipecleaner.

Woven

Woven

Woven

And this one is my son's contribution to the Christmas tree this year.  I turned him loose with the box of pipecleaners and some basic instruction and this is what he came up with.

Well, that's it.  Are you thoroughly bored yet?  Have you ever made Christmas ornaments for your tree?

Enjoy!
Korrina

Christmas Ornaments

Okay, here it is... the blog post I promised.

I've been working frantically on Christmas stuff for my Etsy shop for the last several weeks because I realized at the beginning of November that I really needed to have Christmas things listed by Thanksgiving.  Of course that meant designing, creating, photographing, writing descriptions, and listing several items in just a matter of weeks.  Hence, no time for blogging or anything else. 

Anyway, so here's a little bit about my journey to getting Christmas ornaments in my shop.

My first idea was to make 4 different snowflake canes in translucent (snowflakes) and white (backgrounds) so that I could place them over a colored base layer and have the snowflakes be any pastel color I wanted.  That's where I hit my first snag.  I apparently can't make a pretty snowflake cane to save my life.  This is what I came up with:

The only one that looks even remotely like a snowflake to me is the bottom right one.  (The top right is actually leftover from the center of the bottom right.)

But I made the ornament I had in mind anyway:

Except for the snowflakes that look more like kaleidoscopes, it turned out pretty much how I imagined.  Of course, it didn't go all smoothly.  I had it propped on a skewer on my work table, waiting to be baked when my 18month-old decided it looked like a lollipop (she loves to chew clay anyway-she doesn't swallow it, just chews it up and spits it out) and took a couple of bites out of it.  Luckily, I had extra strings and was able to fix it up good as new.

All in all, I decided I'd had enough of that idea and scrapped it for now.  I might revisit it next year.

So, I thought I'd try some traditional polyclay filigree this time:

It turned out gorgeous if I do say so myself.  However, it took probably 10 hours or more to make and I'm not sure I love doing filigree on a round surface enough to make these to sell.  Oh, well, another ornament for me.

BTW, you wanna know what happens when your clay is done and you just turn the oven off and leave your project in there and forget about it and then later you go to make dinner and you turn on the broiler to preheat and all of a sudden the house is full of this terrible burning plastic smell and you realize you still had clay in the oven that is now getting broiled?  Take a look:

Yeah, I'm using plastic bulbs for a base and needless to say, they didn't stand up to the heat any better than the clay did.  It's a good thing Christmas tree ornaments only show on one side at a time 'cause I hung it on the tree anyway.

I was trying to come up with something pretty, unusual and relatively quick and enjoyable to make.  Here's the one that finally made it in my Etsy shop:

It took a little engineering to get all of the petals lined up so that they covered the entire bulb and still looked like a flower but I think I was successful.

Next I wanted to try some different colors.  I Googled poinsettias and found out that they come in almost any color but I chose a few of the more traditional ones.

Burgundy:

Ivory:

 Blue (although I think the veins should have been skinnier):

And last but not least, pink:

So, that's what I've got in there now.  I've also done some mini ornaments that I will have to blog about later.

Oh, and one last one that I am still experimenting with and trying to decide whether I like it or not.  The photos aren't very good but it's teal and silver.  The skinny stripes were done using a mica shift technique  so they sparkle two different ways.  

Side view:

Top view:

Bottom view:

Hey, let me know what you think and if you have any other ideas for me to try.

Thanks,

Korrina