Friday, December 20, 2013

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.


9 comments:

  1. Thanks for this idea, Christina. I'm going to make some of these for next year. Pictures of the family with dates and add new ones each year. We'll watch everyone grow older. Ha.

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    1. Elaine, I thought about writing the year on the back side of the flatter ornaments with a metallic Sharpie, but my handwriting is atrocious. ;)

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  2. So clever, Christina! Thank you for sharing!

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    1. Piper, I wish I could take the credit for it, but I'm going to have to leave that one to Terri Reed.

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  3. What a clever idea. I like the idea of using a book cover and creating a special gift for my writer friends to celebrate their book debuts. Thanks!

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    1. My mom hung the first one on her tree. My brothers are each getting one and there's one on my tree too. I think my aunts might get some. Probably not before Christmas though. :)

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  4. I like this and will try it next year.

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    1. Patricia, I can't wait to make them for each of my books.

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  5. This is such a cute idea! I will definitely look into doing this for our tree next year!! Too cute!

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