My 2013 Christmas decorations: baubles

Decorated baubles, drying

I believe that this is the only craft that my boys helped me with this past Christmas and even then it was hard going getting them interested initially. But once they realised that glitter would be involved as well as a drying line across the room for J to bash his head on they were all for it!


The baubles came from a charity shop, just plain plastic ones in a mixture of colours. I initially tried to use an embossing pen with embossing glitter which worked really well up until I tried to use a heat gun to set the pattern. Alas, the heat needed to melt the embossing powder also melted the bauble.

Take two involved the more traditional technique of pva glue and glitter. This worked well! Some were glittered all over, some in a pattern and a few were multi-coloured. There was enough mess to satisfy my boy's hearts.

How do you hang baubles? I always used to use pretty lengths of embroidery floss but find wire hooks much easier now. I picked up a cheap packet in a diy store but they can be easily made with thin garden wire or even paperclips. It is much easier to hook an ornament into the perfect place on a tree rather than try to hang them over the end of the branch.

Baubles hung from the ceiling

This last image I am sharing as it was commented on many times by visitors, I blatently knicked this idea from my sister. It is a group of baubles from a large selection box, hung with curling ribbon using a small tab of white blu-tak from the ceiling. The colours are all the same but the texture of the surfaces vary giving a pretty neat effect. The ends of the curling-ribbon (I had to google it's name, it's thin plastic ribbon that I bought years ago and looks like it will last me for years yet) will curl nicely when pulled under a ruler held firmly against the table or with a pair of scissors (see tutorial here). Very simple, fairly cheap and will be coming out again next year.

And that is nearly it for Christmas posts, just one more to go and then I can start looking forward again rather than back.