How to Make Ornaments (Even If You’re Hopelessly Uncrafty)

Yes! Make 2023 the year we bring back being imperfect at stuff!! <3

I haven’t seen this mentioned yet – but cinnamon dough ornaments with a colorful thread/ribbon hold up year after year. I made the salt dough ornaments recently but used too chunky of salt. I’m excited to try out some of these next year!

My family loves to blow out eggs and paint the shells. Protip: hang them above dog level.

Thank you, Alex, I sure enjoyed admiring those drool-worthy ornaments too. Missing the hodgepodge tree of ornaments made and collected through the years. Turns out my kids and the cat can destroy pretty much anything. This year we bought a bin full of plastic baubles to cheer the biggest kid. I look forward to unpacking our beloved old ornaments again someday.

I read that last sentence to my daughter, cuddling on the couch, and she laughed- “that’s literally our tree.”

One year, I went to the library for an adult program, to make Victorian-era Christmas decorations. I was imagining such romantic things. It was actually, the Victorian-era on the Prairies of Canada, a decidedly more depressing environment, of freezing isolation. Ornaments were made from clippings from mail order catalogs and literally anything else that could be salvaged. My ornaments were not at all what I had imagined, but I really, really love them.

Every year my kids and I do a different DIY ornament. Some have held up, some haven’t, some have been a DISASTER. Like last year, when I thought it would be a good idea to dip ornaments in glue and then in beads. Gluey beads were everywhere, and I was vacuuming beads out of the carpet for weeks. But some of the ornaments survived and they make me smile every time I see them.

We’ve done salt dough decorated with paint pens or with seeds/popcorn/whole spices (then coated with Mod Podge). Baking soda based dough is even nicer looking than salt dough. Also, pasta hot-glued together and then painted and decorated with glitter. All have held up for years.

But my absolute favorite: take the top off clear glass ornaments and fill with grated crayon (from all of the bits and nubs of crayons you have lying around; just use a cheese grater). Then heat the ornament with a hair dryer while you turn the ornament gently, until the crayons melt and adhere to the surface. They look so special and lovely, year after year.

Any printed image, laminated, can be turned into Christmas ornaments. We have a slice of salami in remembrance of the time a friend’s daughter hung real ones on their tree, and our family members as paper dolls, dressed in tiny Christmas sweaters, holding wine and gifts. The staff at Staples probably thing I’m nuts for the things I send to print and laminate, but it cracks me up every time I pass the tree.

My 5 1/2 year old daughter and I read The Christmas Pig this month, and noticing we didn’t have a tree topper, promptly made a toilet paper roll angel. She has red yarn hair, black construction paper wings covered in gold glitter, and shiny ribbon dress. Her face, had painted by a 5 1/2 year old, has huge eyelashes so we named her Tammy. She’ll be treasured forever.

These paper stars are so beautiful! They are a little tricky to make but they take basically no money and they look like you should have bought them at the store. They are my favorite ornament every year, even though my mom has given us so many beautiful glass ones. Highly recommend!

http://whataboutpie.blogspot.com/2011/11/make-german-paper-star-to-hang-on-your.html

Just some feedback – for the last few days a lot of the links in the posts just don’t don’t open on Safari (I checked and it works perfectly fine on Chrome for example) – The Bauhaus and Straw links in this post.
Could be just something on my end! Anyone else with this problem.

We have been living on a boat for 5 years, so no trees for us! Before that, we held a big party with all 4 of the families who shared our building; we were all friends prior to living there. Some years we’d get it together to have a lovely tree, some not. One year I just didn’t manage to decorate and left out plain white printer paper, markers, tape, and scissors, and just let folks have at on the tree. It was my favorite tree ever! Such a delight.

As we return to land, I don’t expect to accumulate ornaments again. We kept a handful in storage; I imagine we’ll just make things from paper and then recycle them. It’s such a lovely way to have inexpensive, low-impact fun.

How has no one mentioned the good, reliable paper chain?!! All you need is scissors and a stapler. Cut strips of paper, loop, staple, insert new strip of paper, loop, staple. Keep going until you’re tired. I love me a good paper chain.

When I was little I loved hanging the glued-together, red-and-white-painted cubes my mom had made for one of her first trees with my dad, years and years before I was a glimmer in anyone’s eye. The crafts got more complicated as the years went on, but the idea that enthusiasm is the only make-or-break DIY ingredient gave me the activation energy to launch into so, so many projects I just winged as I grew up. That gave rise to, among other things, the Princemas Tree of 2009, with cinnamon-and-applesauce ornaments I cut into 0(+> shapes and fabric-scrap doves:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/cuttlefish/4198257825/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/cuttlefish/4199012554/

Amateur craftin’! Thank you for the lovely memory; frankfurter queens forever.

A few years ago, we spent Christmas in Freiburg, Germany, with our six year old. Our home for the week was one floor of a large villa on the edge of the Black Forest. We carried a 4′ tree up the street and into the flat and decorated it with gingerbread stars that we baked and strung with ribbon. Each day, the villa’s owner’s dog, Daisy, would come to visit, and would daintily steal a single star to eat. There were very few presents and no fancy ornaments and it was the best Christmas ever.

We don’t make ornaments as such, but apart from the lights, our christmas tree decorations are mostly handmade: decorated gingerbread cookies, orange slices that smell heavenly as they dry, cinnamon sticks, paper star for the top and red paper ribbons. We add a couple things every day throughout Advent (as toddlers find decorating the tree immensely exciting – for a minute or two). The latest addition is an old handmade wooden figurine that a neighbour (?) placed in our mailbox yesterday. There was a signed note but we have no idea who the person is. Christmas mystery!

When I was struggling to make progress on my dissertation years ago and suffering from graduate school-related depression, I started cutting strips from all of the scrapbooking, origami, metallic wrapping, and other papers I had accumulated during a previous life as a graphic designer. Before writing, I would spend ten minutes, sometimes forty minutes, making links and fashioning them into a paper chain. Somehow cutting links and stapling them together gave me the sense of focus and accomplishment that saw me through the writer’s block. The chain grew from ten feet to forty feet to eighty feet. It moved with me to the house I eventually bought, post PhD. It is currently looped in colorful swoops all the way around my living room ceiling. Maybe it’s not “appropriate” decor for a 40-something “professional” adult but I love the cheerful, sparkly reminder that “this too will pass.”

Thirty four years ago I moved from London to Germany alone and that Christmas I decorated my little tree with paper snowflakes I made. I realized that I wanted to make decorations with my own family one day. I met an American solider the next day. We married, moved to Pennsylvania and had four kids together. All but one are older than I was then and my daughters are flying in from London and SF today, one son is deployed to Poland and the little one (now 21) is here with his girlfriend. Time flies. I wish I could say I still had those paper snowflakes but the magic is that they turned into four wonderful kids and over thirty years of family Christmases.

When I was a grad student, I decorated my tree with affordable ‘luau’ theme party decorations from the dollar store. I strung paper leis together for a garland and used paper drink umbrellas as ‘ornaments’. Then we would crank the heat in the apartment and invite people over for a luau in December. I’m a ‘grown up’ now, with a grown up tree and lovely ornaments purchased over time, but I’ve kept all the dollar store decor for the year I decide to have another luau Christmas.

Having a Christmas tree is my favorite thing about being an adult. After nine years without enough space/a good place to put a tree, we moved into an apartment during the pandemic that has the *perfect* place (and tall ceilings), and I’m so happy.

When I was a broke college student, I used seashells (very affordable, from a university museum gift shop) and pinecones (free, from the ground!) to decorate the tree, with a star fish for a star. We still use some of the seashells. Christmas tree decorations are my favorite souvenir from traveling, and we’ve received lots as gifts over the years. xox

Gosh almost 10 years ago my now ex-husband and I were extremely broke during Christmas as twentysomethings working two jobs each. We made a mountain themed tree with layered construction paper yetis, llamas, backpacks. Even thinking about it makes me feel so tenderly towards him.

Whoops, forgot to add — turn those ornaments upside down in paper cups to dry (a few days is best). Then turn them upside to complete drying. Again, the less paint, the better. Pooled paint doesn’t dry that well.

These glass ornaments are on sale in all craft stores right now, have fun with them!

I LOVE all these ornaments.

My favorite DIY is something I do with my granddaughters — remove the tops from glass ball ornaments; drip SMALL amounts of acrylic paints into the balls, and swirl gently. Personally I like small amounts of paint, added one at a time so they don’t mix, with drying time in between colors. Or you could drip a few colors straight into the bottom of the ball, and swirl to marble it. Restraint is the key, and it’s hard not to just add more paint! But it’s very pretty with some clear glass showing…..it looks a bit like a panoramic Easter Egg.

Also: “it’s pretty freeing to be bad at things”. Genius.

Right up there with: don’t let perfect get in the way of good.

More than 20 years ago I was in Amsterdam alone for work during the months over the holidays. I bought a small tabletop tree from the flower market and spent hours by myself making tiny snowflakes out of white paper with the scissors on my Swiss Army knife. I still have them; they’re on our even tinier tabletop tree as I write this. They are my own “family” ornaments, from my own life.

Growing up my mom had those same faux popcorn strands. Maybe one year before she bought them she tried having my sister and I string real popcorn as a “fun” activity. Pro tip: it is a horrible idea to use buttered popcorn for said stringing. Not only does it make your fingers slippery but it also means that when you prick your fingers with the needle (oh so many times) there is salt there to get into the wounds. It’s funny how the things that don’t go right are the ones that become the most cherished of memories.

We lost my mom in January 2020. I wish she was still here to enjoy the magic of the holidays with us.