During the Christmas holidays, kids often get a little antsy. After all, they’re excited. This year, sit down with your children to make DIY ornaments instead of shopping for things to decorate the tree. They’ll feel a sense of pride seeing what they created hanging on the tree. Here’s a great project for a reindeer ornament.
Everyone Loves Rudolph
You can buy all kinds of ornaments at local stores and online. However, there’s something special about helping your kids make ornaments at home. Not only is this reindeer adorable, but it’s also easy to make.
Here are the supplies you’ll need.
- Foam Baubles – For a more traditional ornament, buy baubles in Christmas colors. However, if you decorate your tree using more unconventional colors, that’s fine too. Each bauble makes one ornament. So, you’ll need to purchase whatever number of them you want. In addition, these come in different sizes. Baubles measuring three inches in diameter work great.
- Craft Foam – You’ll use this foam to create the reindeer’s antlers. White works great. Even so, you can go with any color.
- Pompons – Buy the same number of pompons as the baubles. Also, you’ll need red ones. That’s because they’ll become the reindeer’s nose.
- Hot Glue Gun and Glue – Even if you have older kids, warn them about the dangers of using a hot glue gun. For younger children, you’ll want to supervise them closely. In fact, you might want to do this portion of the project.
- Scissors – Caution and supervision go for the scissors too. Now, craft felt is a relative thing. For that reason, the younger ones can use child scissors.
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Putting It All Together
Now comes the fun part of making the ornaments with your children. Before you start, this is a perfect time to make cups of hot chocolate.
Although you can buy foam baubles in green, white, red, and black, there’s another option. If you can’t find the colors you want, you can always purchase white baubles and then use craft paint to change their color.
Start by putting a small dot of hot glue on one of the red pompons. Then carefully attach it to the center of a foam bauble.
Using the scissors, cut the craft foam into shapes that look like antlers. You’ll need two for each ornament. While it’s not hard to figure it out, you can find free patterns alone. However, if you let your kids do this, you’ll likely have amazingly creative ornaments for the Christmas tree.
Place a thin line of hot glue on the bottom portion of an antler only. Next, attach it to the top portion of the bauble and one side. Follow this same step for the second antler.
With that done, you have the cutest Christmas tree ornaments ever. The only other thing you need to do is add something so that it’ll hang on the tree. For this, you can push a wire hanger into the back part of the bauble. However, you can also cut a four-inch ribbon and hot glue it to the bauble.