Paper ornaments

I love making and giving ornaments during the Christmas Season, do you? If so you are at the right spot, I have a some that don't take much tools (like a paper die cutter) and some that does require tools.

A side story to tell, a friend and I got to talking about how much money the spend on Christmas decorations, and then the What do you do? came up. I was like um not spend X amount on Christmas decorations, then talked about how I make a lot of my Christmas decorations because it's fun and my kids also like doing it with me. So now onto my blog post:

Paper is so fun!!!! and there are a tons of things to do with it, so why not make pretty ornaments you would like to give as gifts, or as decorations? So I came up with some that I really like.

 These two snowflakes are the same file, can you believe it? you can find the file at the Silhouettes Design store The first one was done with the DCWV Crisp Luxury paper collection, and the other was done with double sided paper I had from my stash, I have no idea what the brand is. But didn't the paper work nicely for the snowflake?  I hot glued the layers, and added a small pearl embellishment to the middle, but any cute embellishment would have worked well.

 I love manipulating paper, it's fun to see what kind of 3d things you can make, and this ornament was super easy to make, I got the idea from Memory Bounds in Ankeny IA, They have some really talented designers. This tree was originally on canvas borad as a multimedia collage, but I thought it would work really well as an ornament. The long and short of it, is tear 5 different widths of triangles x2, (it doesn't matter how long the triangle is,) you just want the width to keep getting smaller so when you lay it out it looks like a tree. I used two 12x12 paper for this. I tore both edges for the texture, then added some metallic glaze over the ends to make it look distressed. Then I hot glued each roll together, added a ribbon down the side of it, and then added the bead. It was simple and yet so elegant! I think even my small children could do this with my help!

Pine Cone ornament, I was picturing this to be in a cluster of three, but I think one by it's self was really elegant.  I also used hot glue to assemble all the pieces of paper, it was a lot of layers, but turned out really cool I thought! I did use monochromatic double sided paper, that I thought would work well. One side was lighter and had some texture and the other side had no texture and was darker, I switched the layers up a bit just to add some value and some visual interest to the pine cone. I used the last layer to hid the knot holding the pine cone together with a ribbon to hang it, and done! didn't this turned out amazing!?


So there you have it, three simple and yet stunning paper ornaments that are not the usual ornaments you make. Of course I could do another round of paper ornaments, but I think for now I will stop at three!

Did you have any paper ornaments that you make? I would love to see them in the comments below!