I love to give pictures of my children, to their grandparents. I also like to have them for myself. A great gift idea is photo ornaments. I made a few different kinds of them. I thought of even more, too! All of these ornaments were made so that you can slide a picture in from the top.
The first Photo Ornaments I made were out of paper. To make these I went through my scrapbooking stash and gathered any Christmas embellishments that I had. 
I cut out fun ornament shapes next. I cut 2 of each shape out, cutting an extra hole out of the center of the one that would be the front. This will be where my photo will show through. 
At this point you can cut out your photos to fit the ornament openings. I used a magazine just to post on my blog (since I do not post my children on here). Oh, and my daughter had a fit that I cut up something with Hannah Montana in it. 
Glue the backs to the fronts of the ornaments. I like the idea of changing out the pictures so I just ran glue along the very outside of the ornament along the sides and bottom only. So all my photos can slide out through the top. Plus the pictures that I will use will probably be my kids school pictures, which we don't even have yet! 
My kids and I went to town giving Christmas foam stickers some sparkle and extra oomph! These stickers were all just plain before we added glitter, cut them up, and colored on them with marker. 
Add embellishments as you like. I also have ribbon that I curled myself. So, I will be using that ribbon to tie the ornaments to the tree when we actually hang these up. I love the bounce that the curled ribbon gives these ornaments. I also attached many of these embellishments with thick tape (those double stick foam pieces)to give the embellishments more depth. 
I always add the year to our ornaments (and the name of the child). It's cute if you can do this inside some of the embellishments. But if nothing else, at least put this information on the back of the ornament.
Of course I had to make some of these ornaments out of polymer clay, as well. These were so much fun to embellish. I cut out extras of the paper ornaments to use as templates when cutting out the clay for these ornaments. For the green ornament, my kids helped me to string seed beads onto craft wire. I then curled the beaded craft wire around a thin stick and attached the tops to the back of the front piece of the ornament, with super glue. On the all red ornament I love the holly and leaves on the side. I just cut those out by hand. The third ornament was really fun. I rolled the clay into long thin "snakes" and layered them red, green, red, etc. Then, I rolled these "snakes" all together until it was the right thickness to cut my ornament out of it. I love how this turned out and ended up making about an even dozen ornaments this way! ;)
These are my favorite ornaments. They are the ones that I did not help at all with decorating or putting together. Apparently my kids just liked the foam stickers and none of the rest. I think it was the glitter that put them over the edge for my kids. They are so excited to give these to their Grandparents that they asked to do it already! 
Seeing them all together, I'm not sure that I want to give them away now! 
It was so much fun making these with my kids. I thought I was going to do more of it myself then I ended up doing. Great memories were made with my kids when we made these together. We even have extras of quite a few parts of this (the glittered foam stickers, the red/green swirled polymer clay ornaments, and spiral beaded craft wires.)! I'm not sure what we'll do with them, but the kids weren't done crafting when the craft was all finished. I think we will be doing a lot more of the beading, in the very near future. This is the second project I have done lately with the beading and it even got my youngest hooked! My older kids always enjoy crafting with me, but to pull the youngest one in so much was a nice surprise bonus!
Rebecca
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1 comment:
I love this idea. And grandparents do love getting pics. :)
tina
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