High End Easy to Make Diy Christmas Ornaments (Natural + Up-cycled)

Okay I know this might be a little controversial but during today's video we are going to do some holiday ornament DIYs. Over the past couple of years I've shown you a whole bunch of the process of me working on holiday ornaments to sell at some of our local craft shows. This year we have signed up for multiple craft shows which means you're going to get to see tons of what I'm creating for the shows this year. These are perfect for your own tree to make for gifts and or to sell so feel free to take these as inspiration, copy some of the things that I'm doing. I'm all game for it as long as you're creating I'm happy so let's get started on today's projects. For the first tutorial I'm going to use these little round they have a flat end these are doll heads. You can find these online for a whole bag of like 20 or 30 of them really cheap so if you want to make these you can bulk batch make this type of project we're going to do but I'm going to use these as snowmen heads so you just need one for the first project and I call these tree cookies. These are just very thin tree slices. I'm going to need paintbrushes, paint and one more thing I'm going to use this little furniture peg and we're going to use this as a carrot nose it already has some texture on it. I'm going to show you how I make this look like a carrot on the actual melted snowman that we're going to create. Make sure that you keep your hands out of the way don't hold it like this and drill into the snowman head because you're going to drill into your hand if it goes all the way through make sure you're pushed or even clamp down and I'm just using a drill bit that's the size enough that I can put in this peg. I'm going to cut my pegs a little bit shorter because I don't need them quite this long. The drill bit left a little bit of frays here so I want to get those off so that we have a nice smooth finished product at the end. See we have some frays here that's better we have our snowman head we're going to have his nose just going to go in there we're going to get some little sticks and make arms in a minute but before we do that I want to start painting. So first I'm going to set my nose aside and I'm going to start painting the snowman heads and I want to paint white blobs on each of the top of these sort of like these are obviously the melted snow portion. You don't want it a perfect circle painted because you want to make it look like it was melted snow on the ground. Okay we're going to let those dry for a few minutes again we're probably going to do a second coat on that and while we're waiting for them to dry I'm going to paint the little noses to the carrots an orange color and then we're going to let these dry. I always get covered in paint all over my hands when I'm making ornaments I feel like it's the only way it's the only way. When you're painting things like ornaments your paint job does not have to be perfect because not only oftentimes are you using upcycled materials like I do they do look a little rustic in the end anyway so don't feel like you have to be a perfect painter in order to make Christmas ornaments. Once your little snowman heads are dry you can put some wood glue down in the hole and stick your carrot nose into the hole. I'm going to take my black paint and the end the opposite end of the paint brush and I'm going to dip it in it's going to give me a perfect circle. I'm going to make two eyes make them as big or as small as you'd like and I'm going to make a mouth. I always like to start in the middle underneath so that I can evenly make the mouth. A little smiley snowman he's going to smile even though he's melting okay and then we're going to make another one on this one two smiley snowmen. If our melted bottoms were dry we would have one there one on top and I'm going to make it kind of kitty corner and then we're gonna have a snowman on top snowman head these guys look so cute and we can imagine that we have some arms that have melted we can put on wherever we like we're gonna hot glue these on in just a second but I think that our snowmen need a scarf and I have some thrifted fabric this was a pillow cover at the thrift store this is really cute green and white and then I also have some red and white gingham style and I would like to cut these just into just a loose rough sort of rag piece that I can wrap around the neck once the snowman is dry and I cut out a couple pieces and I want to use as much of this fabric as I can for some other projects I'm going to cut right along the edge so they do not waste I love shopping for vintage fabric for thrifted fabric I don't see why I would ever want to buy new fabric and there's so much that's either going to head to the landfill or is being donated it still has tons of life left on it okay something I've learned over the past couple of years when making ornaments for the craft shows ribbon and fancy hanging gear that you're going to use for your ornaments adds up very quickly a couple of years ago I challenged myself to only spend $25 to create an entire craft show worth of inventory we sold a thousand dollars worth of ornaments in under I think we sold out in less than two hours on our first event and so you do not have to spend a lot of money to be able to make things that you can take to sell and or to make gifts for people so one of the tips that I've learned over the years is one of these rolls of like a baker twine or you can get the same rolled mines from the hardware store it has this little yellow that's why I know I got it the hardware store this is about $5.99 and I think if it's baker twine from the dollar store dollar tree dollarama even cheaper you might get a little less than this but there are a lot I think there's a thousand feet a thousand feet of twine on here for five six dollars I will use this this creamy kind of neutral color as well as the brown jute that comes in the same type of roll for every ornament that I have that I have offered up for sale if people want to change the ribbon out after to something that's more custom to their colors or their whatever after that's fine your artwork of your piece of ornament that you've made you're upcycled or made from material um ornament is going to speak for itself you don't need fancy ribbon just have something plain on here you can add tags to this when you're looping it on and what I do is I buy these little eye hooks on Amazon I think I get 500 for about $12.99 and again I'm going to use these on all of my ornaments that need a little hook that don't already have a loop hole and that's going to save me a ton of money if you buy these at a hardware store you're going to get maybe eight or ten in a package for six to ten dollars whereas I can get hundreds of them in a pack on Amazon for you know ten twelve dollars and I have enough for the entire season so think about all of the extra little costs that you're putting in because they add up so quickly take my advice I have learned the hard way before I'm using upcycled loose parts I'm trying not to buy anything that I don't absolutely need it is so easy to hoard crafting supplies so use what you have think look in your in your craft room look around your house so you can see for our little snowman that we are using these wood tree cookies and I'm doing these because I like to have some like natural elements from our farm and typically I would cut my own but I already had a few of these and it's too wet right now for me to cut from my own farm but the ones that I use for the craft show I only have a few of these left I will cut them from our so that will save me obviously time and money these must have been left from my kit or something that I had bought because there's already a hole in them you don't have to use wood cookies if you don't have a farm to cut your own wood these are certainly pretty costly online use cardboard use a piece of hard MDF that comes from a package or something you don't have to buy materials you can use what you have you can use a styrofoam ball instead of a wood ball on the top you can use from something from packaging use what you've got don't feel like you have to have purchased materials in order to make this and I'm just using paints that I already have but he's so cute so far okay so I have my hot glue gun warming up and I'd like to glue on the actual arms of the snowman and I'm gonna put his little scarf around his neck I think this scarf might be a little bit thick but when his face is all the way dry we're gonna put his scarf on and I'd like to put a one or two here and then one over here so it looks like he's sort of melted and trickled down and I might even angle over just a little bit and we are going to have to put one of these little eye hooks on the top of his head and I suggest putting it a little bit back just a little bit because it will help balance it for when it's hanging on a tree okay well I decided to stick my finger on one of the snowman's eyeballs on that one so we're gonna let him dry for a minute so we can reassemble him I'm going to take this apart here I'm going to add wood glue I would always suggest using wood glue if you're going to glue on wooden beads wooden cookies together hot glue just does not last and often people keep Christmas ornaments sort of as heirlooms and I know we've had our same ornaments that our children our family has made all together we've had them for 17 15 17 years and so I would just always recommend using the best e6000 glue or wood glue is always going to be better okay one up here we are little snow people are so cute they look adorable but I think they need some buttons so I'm going to use some brown craft paint and just give them a couple little buttons trickling down as if their buttons have melted okay I don't know about you but I'm really bad at doing this putting a little bit of paint in my cap and using the paint out of it I'll probably put two little white dots on the brown maybe but we have a little bit of drying to do before we can move them too much but they're so cute melted snowman if you wanted to you could do a little cardstock hole punched card little tag that would hang off of here that could say something like uh like a little Christmas pun or something about a snowman it would be really cute or even just to who it's to I think that would be really cute but because I'm going to sell these at a craft show and I don't know who these are going to go to I don't want to put any names or anything on mine I'm probably going to make 30 to 50 of these to take to my shows because I have multiple craft shows this year this next diy is really simple it's just little blocks of scrap wood when I'm making things for ornaments whether it be something more complex yet still simple like our melted snowman I am never wasting anything so I'm going to use a bunch of little chunks that I cut out of a little tiny scrap piece of wood I'm going to sand them up so that there's no rough edges on them I often like the look of just a raw edge on something rather than having the whole thing painted but if you'd like to paint the whole cubes you can I'm just going to paint the top part of these cubes white I have various sizes here I have small medium little chunkier you can see they're not all the same just a light grip piece of sand paper again just left over from another project I'm going to show you with this first one so I have a medium medium and a large you can see that I have sort of another little snowman there and I'm just going to paint the top white again if you want to paint all the sides you can I am going to distress these so don't worry if your wood is perfectly smooth or if your painting is done perfectly we're going to let those dry I'm going to work on a couple more while I'm waiting for those to dry okay so I'm just painting a little face kind of like this I did a little heart on the chest I would not recommend gluing on little beads or buttons or anything on these because it just doesn't stay I've done that in the past only to get to the craft show and whether they're wood glued or hot glued they always end up falling off and then I'm going to put a little eye hook on the top and I have some of these sort of holiday jute strings that Teresa Phillips' mom had put in my stocking over the years and I have a bunch of these so I'll probably use a colorful one or you can use a little piece of thrifted fabric cut into a ribbon or just the baker's twine or jute that we used on the prior one and I'm going to take three different sizes of these little wood cookies here find these in all different sizes and I'm going to paint the backgrounds of these white this will be very similar to the project that we just did instead of making the melting snowman I'm just going to paint them so that the wood cookie part is painted nicely with a circle on each to make a snowman there's a snowman theme going on today these are all ones that I have made in the past that I know I have sold out every single year and I usually make them just a little different than the year before but still around the same idea of what the project is when you're selling out of something every year you need to make that item because you know you can almost guarantee that you're going to sell it again and especially if you go to different shows in different areas I have sold out every year and I have gone to the same show four years in a row and so I've been able to see what works in the next video that we do on the channel that's going to talk about ornaments and how I'll be showing you how to make some different things I'm going to be continually sharing you some tips and tricks along the way that I have learned that really helped me to sell out when I go to shows and the first year that I sold out nobody knew who I was I was living in a brand new province no one knew me from YouTube no one knew anything about me or my family so people weren't just buying because they knew who I was and we sold out in less than an hour and we knew that we had not made enough product so the next year we made twice as much and we sold out and the year after that we made I think 10 times as much and we sold out in only a few hours so hopefully my experiences my tips and tricks can help you if you're not doing shows this will give you hopefully some inspiration for your own handmade ornaments this year to make for gifts or for your own treat okay so what we're going to do is we are going to layer these so I'm going to put one on top of the other when they're dry and then this one on top so just stacking the three I'm just going to make a cute little face just like we did on these ones using the same supplies I had so much fun today making holiday ornaments I have tons of making to do over the next couple of weeks and hopefully I can inspire you not only to get creating use some upcycled materials but make some of your holiday gifts this season whether you're making them for your own tree to sell or to make for gifts for your family and friends you can make things on such a small budget and hopefully I can show you that during these videos if you're new to our channel we just surpassed 172,000 subscribers and we are on our way to 200,000 so if you enjoyed today's video I encourage you to hit subscribe and follow along because we have tons more DIY content coming your way and of course as always on a budget I love you thanks for watching and I will see you on the next one I'm dying to know what you're making this year and are you going to make handmade things for your family for Christmas let me know in the comment section your favorite thing you make for the holiday season what are you making I want to hear all the details