I didn’t make any ornaments this year. Usually come Christmas-time I’ve got a box full of that year’s output but this year I had to sit down and make some. I decided to make clay ornaments from cookie cutters. Here are an angel and a stocking, decorated after baking with glitter.

Then I made a raft of candy canes. At first I was trying to get a real candy cane stripe going using that cane method (not named for candy canes but hey, it works) that I’ve read about but that wasn’t working out at all. I ended up with some crazy results and they started to grow on me, so I made crazy tie-died candy canes. Each one is unique, front and back. You just keep putting red and white clay into the pasta roller, folding and twisting, until you see something you like. Then cut. Fun.

This was made from polymer clay. The basic shape was formed using a cookie cutter and then embellishments were added.

Three more ornament toppers crocheted with thread from a leaflet. I’ve also made the snowman. I think that elf’s a little demented looking.

These were made from The Book Of Paper Quilling which has a nice variety of patterns.

I found that I had to use bigger quills to duplicate her work. The elf on the left was made from 2″ quills which is what the book called for but that was making for tedious, cramped work. The other two are made from 3″ quills and I think the more open quality to the quills looks nicer for something like a Christmas ornament. Now that I’m using the needle tool instead of the slotted tool to roll my quills, they come out smaller overall. I haven’t been able to prevent that yet but using a longer piece of paper than called for seems like a good compromise for now.

The hat bobs are fringed. Ouch. I’ve been reluctant to spend $50 on a fringer but if I had to do much more fringing than this I certainly would. Fringing is a shortcut to carpal tunnel.

The faces are painted on. I’m not such a good painter! But the lopsided features give each elf a certain unique charm.

This was my first attempt from Ornament Toppers. It came out OK except the embroidered face is a little crooked. I’m bad with anything freehand. You have to imagine that it’s on top of an ornament because I was mailing this to someone and it was easier to mail without the ornament (which gets glued on). The pattern called for a lot of the pieces to be glued on but I mostly sewed them. I think it will hold up better.

These I think came out just adorable. For my first efforts with polymer clay I decided to start with stamping shapes out with cookie cutters, seeing as I’m not that artistic. The books make it sound awfully easy to make characters – just make a ball, now add a square, etc. But experience tells me it always takes more artistic ability than they let on.

So first I made a tree. Using the pasta maker to roll out sheets is fun! I made tiny little Christmas tree lights and strung them on, then balls of different sizes to fill in. The hardest part was the star on top. I didn’t have a cutter that small so I had to free hand it. This was the best of about a hundred tries.

Next I made a gingerbread man. Isn’t he cute? And so simple too. My favorite part is his curly hair. It was cuter before but I accidentally broke a little bit off trying to force a hanger through the hole.

Lastly I made a star. At first I couldn’t decide what to do with the star shaped cookie cutter. How do you decorate a star? Just a shape cut out of clay would be pretty dull. I thought about painting it and adding glitter but then I had an inspiration. I decided to make it look like a star shaped Christmas cookie of the sort we used to make every Christmas when I was a kid. So I applied “frosting” made out of a couple of different shades of red/pink, not fully blended to give it a swirly look. And then I made a bazillion little white shots. Yes, each of those is clay! The brilliant part of this idea is that any imperfections only add to the authenticity. I should have made one with multi-colored shots plus silver balls and green sprinkles on top of red and yellow swirled frosting, which would have been a more accurate representation of the kind of work we did as children.

All in all, I’m not sure I like working with clay. A lot of time is spent house-keeping. Either warming the clay up or cooling it down or cleaning it off your hands and your tools so you can work with the next color. But I do like how these came out and there are so many fun ideas out there, I’ll probably try it again.

When Todd saw these in the book he said, “I don’t know. They look kind of bunchy.” Well, he was right. These are made by taking two cloth circles and trying to ease them around a styrofoam ball. The result is kind of bunchy. Add to that the difficulty of getting everything square and centered (it’s hard to find the middle of a ball) and the results are crooked and, yes, bunchy.

I made three because I kept coming up with ways to do the easing better and/or do the math better but the results got only slightly better for all that work. In the end (the green one) I was hand-sewing the two circles of cloth together and pinning and marking every conceivable measurment. And it’s still not so cute. One thing that would help, I think, is to use cloth with smaller scale patterns. The green velvet with silver applique flowers turned into green with random silver blobs once it was disected into quarters. That’s why I added the rhinestones.

I will say that they look much cuter lying down than they do hanging up.

I got this idea out of a book. Hideous isn’t it? It’s huge for one thing. So I went back and looked and it’s meant to be a tree topper, not an ornament. But that only makes it slightly less hideous. I don’t have a good tree topper but it’s not going to be this one either. I’ll make something some day.

So why did I make this thing if I think it’s hideous? Here’s how it happened. When I got all the books in the post-Christmas sale I flipped through them noting that I didn’t have the supplies to make any given project in the book. I needed cookie cutters or stone molds or gold leafing or . . . . So I went to the post-Christmas sales at various craft stores and as I saw things that had been on the materials lists I picked them up. I guess I saw the bottle brush trees and remembered seeing them in the book.

On Sunday I was working on my latest quilled project but I wanted to take a break so I pulled out the books to see what I could make and determined that I almost had enough supplies to make the bottle brush tree thingy. I went out and bought what else I needed and on Monday I made it. Only then did I really look at the picture and notice that it was hideous – not just my version, the version in the book too.

Then I took the leftover bottle brush tree and glued some glittery pom-poms and gold stars and ribbon to it and made this:



which is much cuter.

Some more ornaments based on ideas from the Christmas craft books I got in a post-Christmas sale this year. I got three:

Christmas Ornaments to Make, Christmas Comfort & Joy, and Simply Christmas.

These were done using a special kind of paint that creates a stained glass effect. As with the gold leafing, learning on a spherical fragile object may not be the best plan. I also learned that it was worth it to spend a little extra on the supplies. For my first attempt I used a boxed kit that had tiny samples of a lot of different colors in little pots like the cheap paints made for kids come in. The results were very blotchy and irregular. It was hard to apply the paint from the pots and I think the quality of the paint just wasn’t that good. I was also trying to create my own design from lines and liquid leading (drawing the lines on by hand using a kind of paint). I’m no artist.

So the first one was butt-ugly and got thrown away. For my next attempts, which you see here, I bought individual squeeze containers of paint – much easier to apply uniformly. I also got some of the shaped leading lines they sell. I got stars, diamonds, and circles and used them all as you can see. I still have something to learn about getting a really even coat with no bubbles but the results were significantly better. I especially like the one with the stars.

This was made from a pattern in a Crochet magazine.

This one I kind of invented myself.