2011 Ornament Craft

I love having a craft project for every holiday, or just for fun.  But lately, with everything that has been going on I failed to have a Thanksgiving craft :( and honestly I rather have like 12 days of crafting before Christmas, but that will come next year hopefully.  I did however get to making two ornaments.

The first is inspired from a Pinterest project I used to make twine balls for a wedding shower I hosted in October.  After I made the balls I thought they would look awesome with white string as ornaments, but the problem I found was what to use to make small balls.  I went to hobby lobby and picked up my supplies

Basically all I used was balloons, white string, mid podge, gold and red ribbons, and spray glitter.  First thing I did was take the balloons and barely blow them up, I wanted my balls to be about the size of normal glass ball ornaments.  You can make yours whatever size you feel like.

 It looks like a pile of snow balls!!! Except it was probably 79 outside and they are not made of snow...lol!

I dipped my fingers in the mod podge and rubbed it on the string, making sure it was nice and saturated.  Then I wrapped the string around the balloon in several different directions.  That really sounds so much easier than it actually was.  You have to make sure the string, all of it, stays pretty wet so you have to re-dip your fingers often. After you get the string like you want it, let it dry over night.  The next day you can take the spray glitter and spray it to the strong while the string is still on the balloon.  This is a close up picture of what the glitter looks like with the string still on the balloon.

Then you can pop your balloon and gently pull it out of one of the larger openings in your string.  Ta Da, this is what you get!  I fell in love, I thought it would look really pretty with a tree full of these...next year I cannot wait to add these to our tree.  But I will probably have to make new ones next year, two reasons: one being that the mod podge make not make it through the storage in the attic heat over the FL summer and two being that my parents added them to their angel tree and they actually look good on there!

The second ornament I made was also Pinterest inspired but it will be my gift tags this year.  They are initial ornaments, so simple, cheap and super cute!

 I took the glass and used that as my guide to draw circles on the cardboard and cut them out.  Then I used my cricut and cut circles out of scrapbook paper in the same size...note that was much harder than it sounds!  Then I glued the scrapbook paper circles to the cardboard circles.

I glued different scrapbook paper to the back.  The "D" ornament below was different paper I used from the one above, I promise the back really did match!  Then I used my cricut again and cut initials out of my black vinyl and mod podged over the entire ornament twice and sealed the edges with a glue gun so you could not tell it was cardboard.

I think they turned out super cute and will look awesome on our gifts this year!