Heart Clay Ornaments

After my sappy 'Happy Valentine's Day' post from earlier, I decided to round thing up on a creative note with one final Valentine's day craft.

A friend sent me a link to Marie Grace Designs, specifically her clay ornament recipe. The recipe called for staples I already had in my pantry so I decided to try it out.

I grabbed my heart shaped cookie cutters {they certainly have gotten a lot of use lately - cookies, bird seed feeders}, my typewriter stamp set and I got busy creating.

The best part, when you are done creating you can just set it aside and forget about it while it sets up {I feel like Ron Popeil doing an infomercial for clay ornaments, just set it and forget it}.

They dry a bright white and have the delicate look of porcelain.

I've always been a fan of salt dough ornaments but now that I have tried this clay ornament recipe I am now a convert. Make sure you head over to Marie Grace Designs to get the recipe and have fun creating some ornaments of your own.

More Homemade Ornaments

With less than a week before Christmas {seriously where has the time gone}, this weekend was all about making ornaments.

Top on Grace's Christmas list is a kitten. I don't think that Riley would appreciate the addition of a cat SO I made Grace this ornament, which is as close to a kitty as she is going to get this year.

As I have mentioned, I prefer adding a homemade gift tag to the top of gifts. Loving all things vintage and kitschy I decided to make a Volkswagen van and personalize the license plate.

I received the highest compliment from my husband, when after he saw it, he suggested we need one as well.

I also made a Polaroid tag but since this is going to someone that is 11 I am not even sure she'll know what it is.

Of course, after I finished the Polaroid, I saw the coolest tutorial from Katie Cupcake on making a felt Polaroid ornament incorporating a real picture.

One of my favorite ornaments, that each year gets hung on my tree, is a salt dough ornament I made in kindergarten {a long time ago}.

This year, as a family, we made our own salt dough ornaments. The Christmas trees have one of each of our fingerprints {hopefully, once painted, the fingerprints might look like ornaments or lights on the tree}. The circles have thumb print hearts. My favorite, Grace's partial hand print.

I found the recipe over at Busy Bee Kids Crafts. It does take about 4 hours in the oven to completely dry out your ornaments out SO we ran out of time to paint them...can you guess what we have planned to do today?