Easy Christmas paper craft

Guess what?! I’m a grandma. :) My stepdaughter had her precious, sweet, beautiful boy yesterday and we are over the moon for them. It was so emotional, more than I even thought it would be, to see him and touch him and know he is finally here. I only have a few pics since it was a crazy day but I want to wait to ask to her before I share any on the blog. (It didn’t seem appropriate to bring up my blog yesterday. Bigger things happening.) I’m sure I will (he’s too precious not to share) but it’s Mama’s decision to make.

I recently put together an ornament craft for my friend Kari’s blog but wanted to share it here too in case you didn’t see it. There seems to be a Christmas theme on the blog this week so I figured I’d just go with it. If you read this over at Kari’s you can just fast forward to see what I did with them all at the bottom. :)

This one is easy folks. There’s very little talent involved here, just good old gluing skills. The only part that takes time is the cutting, but I have a solution for that too.

So here’s the thing – I love using paper for holiday crafts. I do it at Halloween quite a bit (bats!) and I’m always thinking of ways to do more with it at Christmas. I love paper crafts for two reasons – you can get really creative with all the fun papers out there and they are SO easy to store since they barely take up any space. (You just want to be a little gentle with them.)

For these DIY ornaments I gathered some festive paper:

The red and cream are the textured cardstock – my favorite! Love that little extra detail.

To do this you’ll need “petals,” so I just free-handed one and then traced it to make a bunch more:

These do not have to be perfect! Is a flower petal ever perfect? Do they all match exactly? No. That’s why we love them. :) Once you get one petal you like you can just trace it over and over.

The trick to cutting out a bunch at a time is to layer your sheets of paper. So I would cut two or three strips out of one piece of paper and then lay the outlined part on top, then cut them out. Does that make sense? So instead of cutting out one each time I was cutting two or three. It helped a ton!:

Then you’ll want to do the same thing again, this time with slightly smaller petals. You won’t need nearly as many of these, probably half.

To start building your flower you’ll want to have something as a base you can glue on to. I just cut circles out of a paper plate, but anything will do:

Just make sure it’s not too big so that it shows behind the petals.

Then start making your flower! I used hot glue but regular glue would work fine. You just need a little dab on the back to make it work. I actually looked at photos of poinsettias to see how many “petals” I should use:

I put six larger ones on the bottom and then three on top. The middle is where I got creative:

I ended up using three jewels on them instead of one, to look more like a real poinsettia bloom.

I only used one piece of each color paper and got eight large flowers:

You can see here how I used a paper punch and scrapbook paper for the centers on some of them:

I kind of pulled the petals up on each one as well to give them some dimension – not a fold really, just a slight bend. I’ve folded the petals down the middle before to make them before and that makes them look even more authentic. But with this many it was going to take forever, so I went easy.

I added some little glittery jewels I found in the scrapbook area to the others:

Those are my favorites. I always say – I’m a non-scrapbooker who LOVES the scrapbook section. ;)

The best part? All of these were just a few bucks. The paper was less than a dollar (half off) for three sheets and the sparkly jewels were a few dollars with coupons.

OK, so my favorite thing about these is you can do whatever you want with them – to use them as ornaments just tuck them into the tree, no string needed! You could hot glue twine or ribbon to the back and turn them into a garland. Stick tape to the back and put them on windows, mirrors, whatever. Or make a bunch and create a paper wreath with them – the possibilities are really endless!

I ended up sticking them inside the Goodwill shadow box I first showed you here. I turned it on it’s side and it’s instant holiday art. :)

I love these things – they are so versatile and they take up next to zero storage space! Major score.

I’m off to squeeze the baby some more right now and then I’m hosting our annual ornament exchange tonight with my girlfriends. This girlfriend needs to clean her house. :)

Hope you have a wonderful weekend, stay warm!