There are plenty of handmade decorations on our tree this year and I'm so happy with the way they turned out. Here are some of my favourites...
Twine baubles…
These cost me $0 to make, because I already had everything for them (you can find the tutorial here). I love how they look on the tree.
Glitter baubles…
These babies are awesome. And so simple. Just paint some polystyrene spheres with PVA, cover them in glitter, leave them to dry and repeat. Once dry, use a pin to attach some ribbon and they’re ready to hang. The small polystyrene balls were 20c each and the big ones were 30c. The tubes of glitter were $1.00 each from a local craft store and I only used about 1/3 of each tube to make four baubles.
Burlap baubles…
Also free as I already had everything. When we were cleaning out Granny’s house, I found some burlap placemats in her cupboard. No-one wanted them, so I claimed them, with the plan to make something special out of them for our house.
After making the glitter baubles, I had some left over polystyrene balls, so I experimented with covering them in strips of the placemats. I tried to stick them a few different ways, but the most successful was double-sided tape. When they were all covered, I used pins to attach ribbon to hang them by. Voila!
Clay Ornaments...
I love, love, love these. I spent $11.00 on some air-dry clay and a Christmas music stamp and then used my cookie cutters to make so many ornaments it’s not funny.
I rolled out the clay, stamped the music on and the used cookie cutters to cut the shapes I wanted. Then I used a plastic straw to make holes for ribbon and put them in the hot water cupboard to dry. The next night I experimented with colouring them. I stuck to acrylic paint, tea and coffee and I’m really happy with the result.
I also spent $7 on a set of foam alphabet stamps, which I used to make a few sets of decorations with faith, hope, love, joy, peace and noel on them (which will be given as gifts). I used a mixture of coffee and brown acrylic paint to go over the letters and then I quickly dipped them in a bowl of tea and paper towelled them dry.
I searched high and low for a set of mini alphabet stamps in a typewriter-type font, but to no avail. After I had given up hope of ever finding them, I happened to stumble across an auction on Trade Me for the exact stamps I had been picturing! I bought them for $18 and they were worth every cent. I have used them for so many things in the past week, but my first project was more decorations.
I made these two for Mike and I...
These to give away...
And last but not least, I made some special memorial ornaments for our missing grandparents. I wrapped them up and gave them to Mike and we had a little moment remembering them all before we decorated our tree. These ones are my favourite. I made them for all our grandparents that won't be with us this Christmas.
10 sleeps to go xo
