Below, please find a list of my personal favorite DIY Christmas ornament tutorials. Whether you’ve got just a precious few handmade ornaments on your own tree, or you, too, have more DIY Christmas ornaments than tree branches, I think you’ll find something here to add to that collection!
Altered Playing Card Ornaments
I KNOW you’ve got a partial set of old playing cards squirreled away somewhere. Haul out the paints and put them to use!
Borax Crystal Ornaments
Sneak a little science into your Christmas crafting with this project that’s part science lab and part handmade ornament. Borax is a good laundry add-in, so you might even already have it on hand!
Folded Hexagons
You only have to sew a teeny bit to make these pretty fabric ornaments. The true trick is in the folding!
Paper Balls
These ornaments are a little tricky to get the hang of, but they look SO beautiful when they’re finished! I like to make them from last year’s Christmas cards.
Tomato Puree Packaging Christmas Ornament
Did YOU know that tubes of tomato paste are so pretty inside? Because I sure didn’t! Cut them open, clean them off, and then make a whole tree full of ornaments that look just like punched tin.
Cinnamon Dough Christmas Ornaments
Cinnamon dough Christmas ornaments are among the first handmade ornaments that I made with my kids–the little elf in that above photo is a freshman at Bryn Mawr this year!–and we still make it using that exact same recipe. We made our most recent set of cinnamon dough ornaments last year, and they came out of storage this year smelling delightfully cinnamony!
Upcycled Cookie Cutter Christmas Ornaments
If you’re feeling artistic, gather up all your littlest bits and bobs and scraps of pretty paper, and makeover thrifted vintage cookie cutters into delightful ornaments. You could even work with plastic cookie cutters, especially if you painted them with textured spray paint first.
Dehydrated Orange Slices
These dehydrated orange slices are especially good if you don’t like a lot of waste or have a lot of storage room for seasonal decorations. After the holidays, simply compost them!
Salt Dough
Today I learned that you can stamp on salt dough! I love how the salt dough is used as the base, with the pretty stamped and colored image on top. Time to get out all my dinosaur stamps!
Embroidered Cardboard Christmas Ornaments
Add in some sneaky math enrichment by showing kids how to make pretty patterns with embroidery floss stitched onto cardboard, or go freeform and just have fun!
Matchbox Christmas Ornaments
Real vintage matchboxes can be hard to come by, but occasionally you’ll happen upon a stash being sold for a song at a local garage sale. They upcycle so beautifully, including into these sweet ornaments!
Mason Jar Lid Rings
These are some of my favorite ornaments to make, because they can be so artistic! To make the Mason jar lid rings match even better, paint them.
Upcycled Thread Spool Christmas Ornament
I hate how thread is now sold on plastic spools instead of the cool old wooden spools that my grandma had. But there are still good ways to upcycle even those tacky plastic spools, including this cute ornament!
Melted Crayon Ornaments
Melted and remade crayons are fun to color with, but they also make cute Christmas ornaments. After Christmas, if you don’t want to save them for the next year, melt them down and make them into something new!
Upcycled Tea Cup Christmas Ornament
This ornament can be a little on the heavy side, so look for the smaller, more delicate tea cups when you’re thrifting supplies. Little dioramas are my favorite type of Christmas ornament!
Papier Mache
This is one of the messiest projects on this list, and the emphasis is on process over product, but the star in that above image still hangs on our Christmas tree every year, and I coo over it just as much to the 20-year-old who hung it this year as I did to the 10-year-old that she was when she made it.
Soda Can Star
I’ve seen a lot of soda can stars around the internet this holiday season, but this style is the prettiest.
Puzzle Ornament
Puzzle with missing pieces? Cut out the cutest part, Mod Podge the snot out of it, and put it on your tree!
Scrappy Christmas Ornaments
These scrappy Christmas stars look the cutest when they’re mismatched, so feel free to use up whatever you’ve got on hand. They also look great with your most boring buttons, so finally you’ve got a use for those billion white buttons you’ve been hoarding!
Scrappy Trees
Whatever teensy scraps you’ve got left after making the stars, above, can go into these trees! The hand quilting is what makes them truly special.
Upcycled T-shirt Ornaments
Little kid T-shirts with their smaller-scale images work great for this project, but you can also cut interesting elements out of larger graphics on larger T-shirts.
Wine Cork Christmas Ornaments
Cork is a natural material, and it’s even better when it’s upcycled! I love how open-ended this project is; little kids could happily paint corks and stick washi tape alongside others who want to make their wine cork intricately detailed and elaborate.
Recycled CDs
The awesome thing about CDs and DVDs is that they’ve each got a shiny side! If you’ve got the graphic design skills, you can digitally design a front for your upcycled CD/DVD ornament. But if you don’t, then scrapbook paper or even a hand-drawn image looks just as delightful on the tree.
Shrink Plastic Snowflakes
Did you know that #6 plastic is shrinky? Celebrate by making some snowflakes!
Tuna Can Christmas Ornaments
If you don’t eat anything fishy, ask around among your friends who are cat owners and you’ll find plenty of cat food cans to make these ornaments with. I love that they look like mini dioramas–it reminds me of Sunday school when I was a tiny kid! Do YOU have a favorite handmade ornament? Tell us about it in the Comments!
