Made by Megan, with love!
It's almost Christmas and we are SO EXCITED!Since our sister Karla just had the premature twins that Dana talked about in her previous post, she and her husband have been very, very busy and I have been lucky enough to be able to watch her oldest, Logan! My precious nephew is almost 2 years old, and he loves to help everyone with everything all the time! My mother and I thought it would be a good idea to have Logan make his Mommy and Daddy a homemade Christmas present! We were trying to think of something fun for him to make that Karla would actually appreciate having. So, naturally, I went straight to my favorite website, www.pinterest.com.
I found something on Pinterest kind of similar to what we ended up doing with Logan. It was about painting the inside of a clear glass Christmas bulb to hang on the tree. So I just took this idea and made it little-boy-friendly! I'm sure someone else has thought of this before, but I thought it was pretty clever...
All you will need is:
- Clear Christmas ornaments (we used plastic bulbs for obvious reasons)
- At least 2 Acrylic Paints of any color
- Masking Tape
- Newspaper or old towels (to cover the table)
- Black Permanent Marker
- Isopropyl Alcohol (aka rubbing alcohol)
- Cotton Balls (one per ornament)
- Long Tweezers
Just follow these steps:
Optional:
- Pour some Alcohol into the bulb to clean the inside. This will help the paint stick to the surface better than if it was dirty. Swirl around the alcohol, then pour the rest out.
- Let it dry for a little bit on its own, blow in it, then realize this will take forever and shove one cotton ball in the ornament. Give it a good shake then let the cotton ball sit for a little while and it will eventually dry out the inside of the ornament. (This is what worked for me. Letting them dry on their own would work just as well, I'm sure)
- Use the tweezers to remove the cotton ball from the ornament.
- Write whatever you would like to write on the ornament with a black permanent marker. I wrote the names of my niece and nephews, my sister, and her husband. Then I wrote "2012" on the opposite side.
- Once the marker has totally dried, Choose 2-3 colors of Acrylic Paint to use in your ornament. I wouldn't go more than 3 because your colors would start to blend together and make an ugly brown color.
- Set the top hooky thing to the side. You won't put these back on for a few days until you are sure your paint has totally dried!
- One color at a time, squeeze a decent amount of paint into the opening of the ornament. Try to get a little bit on different sides of the ornament, not just plopped down in the bottom.
- Cover the opening with masking tape.
- SHAKE! You really need to shake it a lot until the paint has spread around inside the bulb and there are no huge globs anymore.
- Lift the masking tape and add your next color. Repeat steps 4-6. It is okay if there are clear spaces! If you shake it to much your colors will start to blend a little, and we don't want that.
- Add another color if you would like! I did 2 colors in a few and 3 colors in the others. They both look really nice.
- If there are big blank spots that you want filled in, add a little drop of any of your colors in that area and shake until it is just covered. While your ornaments sit to dry for a few days, those little gaps will most likely fill in. Mine did.
- Sit them upright to dry (I put mine in plastic cups so they couldn't roll).
And you're done!! These are so easy and they turn out so so so cute! They are really cheap, too! The bulbs were about $1.50 each and the paint was maybe $2.00 each. I had all the other supplies. I loved this project so much! I will definitely remember this DIY craft for the future. They are a cute gift for anyone at any age. LOVE!
