Make your own Christmas Ornaments #3: Filled Ornaments

If you are crafty and like to create, you are surely already thinking about making Christmas ornaments for this year’s tree! If you missed my first two blog posts about making your own ornaments, be sure to go back and check out “Glitter Ornaments” and “Floating Ornaments“, both so beautiful, and they make great gifts! For this round of Christmas Ornaments, I will share with you ideas on filling your ornaments with various items to make cute, whimsical, decorations for your tree!

In the photos above, you can see I have a Christmas Song theme.  I love Christmas time and love Christmas music. Being able to display songs I enjoy on the tree is fun! These are simple to make and you do not need many supplies. If you do not have a  cutting machine (Cricut or Silhouette) you may have to get creative with lettering or just fill your ornaments and not use words. See more examples below the directions.

General Supplies Needed:

Glass or Plastic ornaments (ball, disc-shaped, square-shaped, etc.)

Fillers (bells, hay/straw/raffia, fake snow-many varieties, tinsel/garland,  sand, small items such as the Christmas tree above, shells, etc. The possibilities are endless!)

Ribbon (to use as an embellishment or to use as your hanger)

Vinyl wording or stickers (You can use your cutting machine to create your design)

Vinyl, Transfer paper, weeding tool (if designing wording)

The photos above should give you an idea of what types of ornaments to purchase for this project. You can buy 3″ or 4″ balls, discs, square-shaped ornaments. They can be glass or plastic. It doesn’t really matter, as long as they have an opening so you can fill them. You can purchase ornaments from Hobby Lobby, Michaels, Dollar Tree, AC Moore, Walmart, and JoAnn.

General Directions:

1. Decide on your design and what you will put in your ornament.
2. Purchase all the necessary supplies
3. Create your design using Cricut Design Space or Silhouette Studio. There are many free designs (svg’s) you can download from sites such as www.lovesvg.com or that you can purchase from such as Etsy. If you do not have a cutting machine, you can purchase vinyl designs from the craft store or you could use stickers.
4. Apply the design to your ornament. (for those with a cutting machine, I recommend using 651 vinyl and you can use clear contact paper to transfer).
5. Fill your ornament. Carefully fill your ornament… especially if you are using a glass ornament. Do not make your ornament too heavy. When I made an ornament with sand, I ended up having to take out half of it so that I could hang it on the tree. When I was making a floating ornament and put a few bb’s into my glass ornament, it broke! I had to redo it and decided to use plastic instead and that worked great! So keep in mind what you are filling your ornament with before choosing glass or plastic and make sure you can put the top on and hold it without it coming off. For the “O Christmas Tree” ornament above, I placed a glue dot down in the bottom center using a Cricut tool then pushed the tree on top of it, to hold it in place.
6. Embellish! Put the little silver top back on the ornament and then you can either use a regular wire ornament hook or use some pretty ribbon, jute, or cord. You can embellish your ornament with curly ribbon or a big bow. In the “Believe” ornament below, I tied a bell on the outside with my ribbon.

So what about some other ideas? Well, if you wanted to continue with the Song theme, how about “Silent Night, Holy Night” and fill the ornament with stars or you could do another bell ornament and add “Sleigh Bells Ring” or use just silver bells and put the words “Silver Bells” on the outside.

For the snowman face ornament above, I used little styrofoam beads from the dollar store, but you can also use fake snow … instead of a snowman face, you could do “Winter Wonderland” or “Let it Snow”.  How about filling an ornament with red pom-pom balls, red garland, or red ribbon and the adding a painted or vinyl belt around the outside to look like Santa? That would be cute! You could do something similar to make a reindeer by filling the ornament with a brown gift bag filler then adding a nose and eyes and antlers on the outside.

One that I plan to make is to fill the ornament with pretty feathers then apply a design on the outside that says “Feathers appear when angels are near”. I guess what I am trying to do is get you to think about what Christmas means to you and what is special to you at Christmas time. Use those thoughts and memories to help you create ornaments for your tree or to give as a gift!

Please give me a like if you enjoyed reading this and follow my blog if you want to see more craft ideas! Come visit me on Pinterest and please share your ornament creations with me. Thanks for visiting! Kristina