How To Make Homemade Ornaments – Easy Recipes
These easy recipes for homemade ornaments are fun gifts to make, easy on the budget and great to receive!
Homemade Applesauce – Cinnamon Ornaments
- Pour equal amounts of applesauce and ground cinnamon into a bowl and mix well into a dough.
- Roll out and use cookie cutters to cut stars, gingerbread men, etc.
- Insert a small hook from the jewelry department of a craft store into top of each ornament (or a paper clip or ornament hanger will do).
- Let dry on wax paper for a few days, turning over every morning and night.
- When dry (3-5 days depending on temperature and humidity), use white craft paint to add “frosting” accents.
These make great homemade ornaments and should have a scent even next Christmas, if you store them in plastic zip lock bags. After many years when they lose their scent, cinnamon oil can be rubbed over them to perk up the fragrance.
Homemade Salt Ceramics Ornaments
1 cup salt
1/2 cup cornstarch
3/4 cup water
food coloring
Mix well and heat until mixture thickens. Roll into ball and chill. When cold, roll out mixture about 1/4″ or a tiny bit thinner. Cut into cookie cutter shapes. Place on wax paper-lined cookie sheets. Decorate with glitter, beads, sequins, poster paints, nail polish, old jewelry, felt, another color of ceramic dough or any scraps. Be sure to make tiny holes with a large needle for hanging or insert a paper clip while wet.
This recipe makes wonderful homemade Christmas ornaments that last for years if packed away carefully in a cool, dry place. I have some homemade ornaments that I made which will soon hang on our tree for the 40th year – still in great condition!
My favorites are gingerbread men, hobby horses, Christmas trees, angels, sleighs, bells. A candy cane can be made by twisting two “snakes” together with the colors already mixed into the dough. The pastel colors in mine didn’t even fade. An ornament is nice to give to friends. Everyone loves an unexpected gift! A box of these handmade ornaments makes a nice wedding gift, since most newlyweds don’t have ornaments when they get married.
I done the applesauce and cinnamon ornaments before. Those are fun. This recipe for ceramic ornaments looks like fun! Maybe we can make these too! My little ones can make gifts with these! What fun!
Thank you for sharing!
The cinnamon ornaments smell good enough to eat, but don’t! They don’t taste good! I made a few that looked like cookies, intending to put them on a plate and scent my living room Chritmasy. A friend came over, and spying them snatched one up. I explained it wasn’t cookies but to make the room smell good. He gave me a look that said “That’s a ridiculous explanation. You’re just saving them, and I’m having one!” He took a bite and it looked like his mouth turned inside out!
He swears to this day that I forgot the sugar. He just can’t wrap his head around the idea that they weren’t cookies but a type of potpourri ornament! Lol!!!
That is too funny. Bet he listens to you next time. :)
Those cinnamon ornaments smell so good. I made them last Christmas and gave a few to an older woman from Church who is in her middle 80’s and she just loved them. They reminded her of her childhood and her mother’s handmade christmases.
Do you let the salt ceramic ornaments just dry at room temperature? Thanks for sharing – will be making these this weekend with the grandkids.
Yes you do.
One year a friend of mine made me a cross ornament, using edible small twisted snack pretzels as building blocks. She hot glued the pretzels together in a cross shape with a hot glue gun, then finished it off with a ribbon trim. I held up for quite a few years. I guess a person could make a completely edible ornament, by using hot melted sugar as glue, and dipping the individual pretzels in the candy syrup along the edges to be joined. This has to be done with caution, as hot melted sugar can be very dangerous. Don’t try this when you have the kids around. If you have any experience making homemade brittle or hard crack candy, you should be able to do this. Have everything ready ahead of time, (including a well oiled cookie sheet to lay your ornament on to cool) and melt a small amount of sugar in an open heavy frying pan, over medium heat. Stir the sugar constantly until all of it is melted into a liquid and turns golden brown. Turn the heat down super low, and work quickly to dip the edges of the pretzels where you want them to join another pretzel as a building block. Do one join at a time and allow the “glue” to cool a bit, before moving onto the next building block. It is easiest to assemble the cross flat on the cookie sheet. When the ornament is totally cooled, it will lift off of the cookie sheet in one piece if the sheet was properly oiled.
How long does it take for the salt ornaments to harden
It takes about a week to air dry or about 10 mins. in a 180 degree oven. They are dry when when you tap them and they sound hollow. They might turn slightly brown if you bake in the oven or you could do a combination. Let them air dry for a few days then finish in the oven.
We were cleaning out my great-grandmother’s house after she passed away and found a shoe box in the very back corner of her guest room closet of some salt ornaments that we (my 3 cousins, sister and I) had made but had never decorated. I think I was 5 or 6 when we made them. We all remember making the ornaments but they took “forever” to dry so grandma put them up to decorate after Christmas and they were forgotten. Anyway, approximately 35 years later we finally decorated our ornaments. My boys hung mine front & center of the Christmas tree and think it is cool that I finally got to paint my ornament…they are 13 & 16.