It’s the final week before Christmas. I’m happy to report that I’m pretty much done with holiday shopping, decorating and most crafting. Yay! I’m now looking ahead to plan the kid’s birthday party in January. I’m usually so behind on the planning of that little shindig because of the holidays, I’m scrambling at the last minute. Well this year he has very specific requests! *sigh* These get more detailed and challenging every year as he grows older. The kid sure keeps me on my creative toes!

Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself. We still gotta get to Christmas first. My photography outlet has been taking a little breather while I work on holiday gifts, projects and excursions with my kids. So this week, I thought I’d share some holiday themed crafts we’ve been working on in our home.

This cute little project was something Rex and I worked on for his classmates. He wanted to give them each a little gift at the holiday class party on the last day of school. I had to come up with something pretty simple and inexpensive since we had to make 22 of them! The school is not a big fan of sweet treats, so I scrapped any cookie or cake pop ideas.

Enter our home-made holiday ornaments.

I purchased 22 of these clear plastic ornaments at Michaels. They were half off and came out to be about $0.50 each. The only other items needed were a variety of acrylic paints, glitter and something to hold them while they dried (I used plastic cups), all of which I already had.I drew inspiration from this project from this site

First off remove all the tops. (duh!)

Next, make sure the busy-body toddler has enough markers to color the table and herself with so she doesn’t get paint all over her, you and her brother.

Rex began squeezing and pouring the paints directly from the bottles into each ornament. He turned them slowly as he squeezed. I did have to help him with some since 22 is too many to hold a 5yo attention span

The trick to getting the dripped paint look is to not put too much that it ends up pooling at the bottom. Squeeze just a little and let it slowly drip down over the course of a few minutes

We let them dry right side up first in the plastic cups until the paint dripped to the bottom.

Then we turned them over so all the access paint dripped back out of the ornament.

After it looked like most of the access paint had dripped out and dried a little, we added the glitter in. Just make sure it’s not completely dried so the glitter will stick to the paint.

Then we put them back into the cup face down again and let it dry for a few hours. I did check on them periodically to see if there was still too much paint in some. The glitter would slide back out with the access paint when there was. If that happened, I turned them back right side up for a little while and added more glitter.

He wanted to label each ornament with the name of the recipient. I used my trusty hole-punch to punch out circle tags for him

Night fell and my good light to photograph my projects disappeared. However I was out of good daylight time for him to next work on this so Rex had to continue working in less than desirable lighting conditions. Yes I know I’m a little ridiculous about my light. Anyway if I was going to photograph him writing his tags out (which I definitely wanted to because he did SO WELL remembering every single 21 classmates without having to ask me!) I was gonna get some pretty bokeh lights in the background then.

I attached the tags to each ornament with some bakers twine and we were done!

We brought them to school the next day and he proudly handed them out to each of his little friends. He even remembered to make one for his teacher!

This really was a pretty little project to make.