Homemade Christmas Ornaments

Every year in the past I have bought the kid's Christmas ornaments. But they are old enough now that they love to make crafts, so I decided that we'd make out Christmas ornaments this year. They had so much fun making them that I think we'll make them every year from hear on out, too. They are so much more precious when they are made by the hands of my munchkins! I found so many different homemade ornaments tutorials online that were so very cute, but a lot of them would've been a little difficult for my munchkins, yet, as they are 5 and under. So I came up with my own.

We already had all of the items used in this craft so it didn't cost us anything extra. (Plus!!) So here's what we did. I have a lot of empty egg cartons in my pantry, so I cut one up to make snowmen and a Christmas tree. The girls made snowmen and V opted for a Christmas tree.

So I just cut out enough of the sections from the egg carton so that each ornament had 3 separate sections. They painted their sections with some cheap craft paint. The girls used white and I tinted the white with food coloring to make green because I can not find what safe place I put the paints so that the kids can't find them!!

This is the cleanest V was the entire process!! Oh, and he was tinted green too for awhile from the food coloring!!

R was pretty quick to get hers painted.

E had fun with the paint. I think she ended being cleaner than V at the end! Notice they all have on old work shirts of mine that had already been inked up so they wouldn't stain their clothes.

Once the paint was mostly dry, we moved on to decorating them. V had a great time with the glitter!

R used a paintbrush to paint glue on her little snowman scarf to attach it to the snowman body.

And here is how they turned out:

R's snowman. I didn't do a very good job of tying them evenly apart...I just poked holes in the tops of each section before they started painting and then they picked out 2 or 3 colors of embroidery thread that they liked and I strung it through and knotted it on the inside of each section so that they wouldn't slide around.

V's Christmas tree. He decorated the insides with LOTS of glitter!

And E's snowman. I had to help her glue on her snowman parts, but she had fun with the glitter too!

We made the ornaments about 3 weeks before Christmas so that they would be completely dry when we put up the tree. We got the tree all decorated about 2 weeks before Christmas and the kids had a blast. It's fun seeing them get excited when I get out one of their ornaments because the remember which ones are their's every year. We always get a real tree because they smell so good and we don't have to store them! So we don't like to put it up too early. The cat did not try to climb up the tree once! But he did play with the ornaments that were low enough for him to reach.

We got all of the ornaments on and R got to put the star on top of the tree.

And here's what our tree looked like after decorations were one. It had lights on it too but they were not turned on so they are hard to see. You see all of those ornaments towards the bottom of the tree? Every day they kept getting moved up higher and higher because Boots kept playing with them and the kids did not like that! So we ended up with a bare tree at the bottom and clumps of ornaments here and there! After we got it decorated they couldn't wait until there were gifts under it!!

Keeping Things Fun!

Jess