Materials and the sequence of the job sit together on this page.
Hello Bekob! I’m Michelle Hinckley and I blog at 4men1lady. As you can imagine I’m in constant pursuit of bringing beauty and order to my house full of men. I’m so excited to be one of Cassity’s newest contributors and share with you my love for interior design, crafting and handmade projects! Thank you Cass for having me.
For my first project I want to share with you some really inexpensive handmade ornaments…like free-inexpensive. This year I went for an all white Christmas decor theme at my house which meant needing new ornaments and holiday hoopla all in white. “New” is usually code for “cha-ching” but not this time.
If you’re an avid fan of design you may have noticed that arrows are the latest big trend and are popping up in jewelry, fashion, art and interior design. I’m in love with this trend too. In fact, I’m considering wallpapering my oldest sons room in arrows (he doesn’t know this yet).
1, 2, 3, 4, 5
So are you a fan of the arrow craze? I always love finding little, subtle ways of bringing these trends in to my decorating. So I figured why not take a page from the craze and put them on my Christmas tree?!
We’ve been finishing our basement for the past few long months and are finally at the finish line (hallelujah!). We just finished painting and have a ton of paint stir sticks lying around. Now I’ve done a lot of projects with paint stir sticks including this popular house numbers post but this time I decided to re-purpose them as holiday ornaments. Paint stir sticks are free at most stores.
On the particular day I went to my paint store to pick more up the guy at the counter had no customers there and was just staring at me. I felt that it would be in poor taste if I grabbed 30 sticks and said something lame like, “I’ve got 30 cans of paint that need stirring” so I took 5 and came up with a different game plan. As I was doing other shopping I noticed that you can but a whole bundle of wood shims for low-cost. They are very similar to paint stir sticks but aren’t as smoothly finished and have one side thicker than the other. No problem.
The first thing I did was run the sticks through a table saw length-wise to cut them in half. Then I played around with the miter saw cutting several little pieces at a 45 degree angle.
I used up all my paint stir sticks on the first few arrow ornaments. Then I moved on to my wood shims. Using a glue gun I simply assembled and glued the wood pieces to make several arrows. I found that the more imperfect I made them, the better I liked them.
At this point you can either leave them as is and hang them on the tree or you can stain or paint them. I gave them a quick coat of spray paint since I was going for an all white theme.
I hung them with some jute twine and I love the way they turned out.
There you have it…Christmas ornaments that are right on trend! (You can also look at our Handmade phone book ornaments here).
Merry Christmas and happy holidays! To see more of our handmade projects and home tour stop on by our blog at 4men1lady!
Looking for more direct Christmas ornaments? look at these 35 handmade paper ornament tutorials.
