So this is the last you’ll hear from me before New Years.  It’s been a busy season of Etsy sales, which I just wrapped up with a final shipment of six orders today.  My husband and boys learned how to make due without me a lot over the last couple weeks, but it was well worth all the effort.  Thank you to all my wonderful Etsy customers, it was wonderful to finish out my year with such a bang!

In the midst of the chaos, the boys and I stole this Pinterest idea last week to make some teacher’s and grandparent’s gifts.  I’ve learned that people actually do read my blog, which means when I post this stuff before Christmas, it’s not a surprise for their intended recipients any longer–but I make the sacrifice to offer you these last-minute ideas before Christmas is upon us, because they wouldn’t be much use after. (:

So, I will offer another before and after picture here, in the spirit of my Candy Cane Flops that I posted about last week.  Of course, our hand-painted ornaments didn’t turn out nearly as beautiful as these, but they were fun to make anyway, and if life is more about the process than the product, then this project fits the bill.

So, here’s the idea we were trying to recreate:

Handmade Painted Ornaments

Here was our version:

We bought a pack of clear, glass ornaments from a craft store (pretty sure you can find them at Walmart too) and I let the boys pick out a selection of acrylic paints.

Then, we opened up the top of the ornaments and started squeezing the paints inside, letting it run down the sides of the ornaments (to reiterate, on the inside of the glass, not the outside).

Not a great picture above (hard to focus on something clear), but you get the idea.  Then, we started shaking, rattling and rolling, trying not to break the glass.  I didn’t let my four-year-old participate because of how delicate of a process it is, but my 5-11 year olds did.  It was a bit of a slow process, we found it was helpful to tap on the glass, roll the ornament around in our hand, and add more paint a little at a time till all the gaps were filled in.

This was one of my favorites, achieved with a lot of tapping against the palm of our hands

The best part of all of this was that the paint was inside the ornament through the whole thing, so there was not a lot of clean up involved–that’s my kind of kid-friendly art project!

Here is a link to another post with directions on doing this, though she didn’t do it with kids, so the process turned out a little different for us.

I hope you all have a Merry Christmas, I look forward to time with friends and family reflecting on the birth of our risen Lord and Savior.  See you next year!