Homemade Photo Ornaments

Every year I try to make something homemade. This year I'm making Christmas ornaments. Since I don't want to risk my family seeing their homemade ornaments I'm going to use a copy of my book cover.

First you want to purchase some clear ornaments from your craft store or Wal-Mart. There are various sizes. I chose the large round globe and the flatter circle for today's post.

Choose a picture and print it on photo paper using a custom size of 2.74X3.68.

 Obviously you cut them out. ;)

 I had to trim the photo down a little and then I decided to round the edges. You can use this fancy corner cutter or use a round edge to draw your corners on the back side.

I'm not very good at the free hand thing so I'm glad I had this corner cutter.

 You want to roll your photo without damaging it, so not too tight. I tried a Sharpie marker but it was too small. Strangely, I had one of my daughter's Christmas gifts in my purse, a guitar slide, and it worked perfectly.

 Slide the photo into the ornament. For the globe you'll probably want to use two photos.

 Make sure they are facing away from each other like this.

 You can use fancy shredded paper, but I wasn't able to find the right color to accent my book cover, so my mom suggested using garland and it works perfectly.

Cut off 4-5 inches and insert the garland between the photos to fill the globe. You can use a pencil to move the garland around if you need to.

 Here's a photo of the flatter ornament. You only need one photo for this one.

 This is the flatter ornament filled.

And here are both of them. Personally, I like the flatter one over the globe. Not only can you make more of them with less printing but I think they look nicer because they're not as distorted in the flatter one.

This project only takes a few minutes to create several personal ornaments that will hopefully be cherished for years to come and the hardest part about this choosing the pictures you'd like to use.