Handmade Christmas Ornaments

This year I decided to decorate for Christmas using white, green and pearls.

I started by creating some new handmade ornaments.

First I ordered some blank wooden ornaments to form the base. They came in a pack of 25.  For this project I only used 12.

The first thing I did was to paint front and back of each ornament with white acrylic paint.

Then I went to Pinterest and found 12 vintage style black and white images sized to fit the wooden ornaments, printed 6 to a page and printed with my laser printer.  Using Mod Podge I glued one image to each ornament.  I didn't worry that the images didn't completely cover the entire ornament since I was going to partially cover them with paperclay molded pieces.

When the glue was dry I used sandpaper to sand off the excess paper and smoothed all the edges.

Then using paperclay and 3 different IOD moulds I made appliqués for the tops and bottoms of the ornaments.  I used the same mould for all the bottoms of the ornaments but used different moulds on the tops of the ornaments.

I just used parts of appliqués.  Filling just the portion I wanted to use with the paperclay.

I removed the appliqués from the moulds and using white glue I glued the appliqués to the ornaments.  While the appliqués were wet I used the wooden end of a fine point paint brush to make the top hole.

The next thing was to let the appliqués dry and them paint the paperclay white.  Once I had the appliqués painted I mixed water with the white paint to make a wash and quickly washed the images and rubbed off most of the white to give the images a softer look.  Image on the left is before the wash.

Next I made a gray wash and applied that to the paperclay appliqués and immediately rub the wash off the raised areas.  Image on left is before gray wash.

Next I applied two shades of glitter to the sides of each ornament.  I ran a bead of white glue down each side and sprinkled with the glitter.

 

I let everything dry then cut about 8" of silver gray ribbon to make hangers for each ornament.

I made a few more paperclay ornaments the same way.  Moulded the clay, removed from mould, let it dry, painted white, but this time I rubbed the raised areas with silver Rub N Buff. Then added glue to the centers and sprinkled with glitter.  Next I cut off a few pieces from lace in my stash and hot glued to the bottom of each ornament.

IOD Mould

For these I add pink checks and lace medallions to the dried ornaments.  Again I made a hole in the center top with the wooded end of a fine point paint brush to create the hole for hanging while the clay was wet.

And here they are hanging on our tree.

Happy Crafting!