Deck your halls with these cute homemade ornaments
PINECONE ANIMALS
Fill your shelves with little critters—like owls, hedgehogs and penguins—made from pinecones, nutshells, felt and imagination.
What You’ll Need
• Felt in a variety of colours
• Scissors
• Hot glue gun
How to Make Them
Cut out animal shapes such as faces (including eyes, mouths and snouts), limbs or wings and tails from different coloured felt sheets. If you’re not comfortable doing this free-hand, many crafters offer felt-animal templates online.
Glue facial features together, then glue this and other parts to your pinecones.
Place each pinecone animal whimsically throughout your home.
SALT-DOUGH ORNAMENTS
Prep this three-ingredient dough then have hours of fun molding it into candy canes, Santa hats, handprints and other shapes to bake, paint and hang on the tree.
What You’ll Need
• 4 cups flour
• 1 cup salt
• 1.5 cups warm water
• Acrylic paint, sparkles and other decorative items
• Clear glaze finish of Modge Podge
How to Make Them
Preheat oven to 250 F. Combine flour, salt and water and stir to make a thick dough (add more water if the dough is too dry and crumbly).
Roll out the dough and cut it into your favourite seasonal shapers—by hand or using festive cookie cutters. Don’t forget to poke a hole in the top for the string to hang them with.
Bake for 1 to 2 hours—until dough hardens. Before decorating, let the ornaments rest for a couple of days.
Decorate to your heart’s desire, then coat them in clear finish or Modge Podge and voila! You’ve got yourself some heartfelt homemade ornaments to hang.
COFFEE FILTER GARLAND
String together ruffled pom-poms of coffee filters to create an understated accent for a doorframe or decorative mantelpiece.
What You’ll Need
• A length of yarn or twine (about twice as long as your doorframe is wide)
• White and natural-coloured coffee filters (basket-style filters work best)
How to Make It
Stack together 10 to 15 coffee filters, mixing white and natural colours, and staple at centre. Repeat the process to make at least a dozen ruffled stacks.
Using a small nail, poke a hole in the middle of each stack.
Tie a knot at one end of your twine. Thread the first filter stack onto the twine; secure it by tying a second knot at the “top” of the stack.
Tie another knot about six inches farther along the twine, then thread the next stack of filters until it reaches that knot. Repeat the process until all filters are strung.
With your fingers, lightly ruffle each filter to create proper pom-poms, then drape across your doorframe.