Wedding Invitation Christmas Ornament

It's no secret that I love giving handmade gifts. There's something special about making something with your own hands and proudly presenting the final product to your family member or friend. Do any of you feel that way? I'm guessing the answer is probably yes if you read blogs like this one!

And you know what makes a handmade gift extra special? Personalizing it for the recipient. Using materials that are special to them. Monogramming it. All that kind of stuff. LOVE that.

One of my favorite personalized, handmade gifts is a wedding invitation Christmas ornament. I've made them for a couple of years now for many of my family and friends who have gotten married over the course of that year. It's a perfect way to commemorate that major life event, and they get a special reminder of it each year when they put up their Christmas tree.

These are super easy to make and only take about 15 minutes, max, to put together.

 Supplies needed: 

• Wedding invitation (or any other invitation that has special meaning!)
• Empty Glass Ball Ornaments (I got mine at JoAnn Fabric, and I've found them at Hobby Lobby before too. The ones in the link are similar - *affiliate link)
• Scissors
• Finger (yep, your own!)

{The roll of ribbon in the photo above is just there to hold the glass ball ornament in place!}

Step 1: Cut invitation into strips line by line.

The key to this step is to cut your strips so that they are narrow enough to fit into the neck of the ornament. I had to trim several of mine down because they didn't quite fit (which is why the names of the bride and groom are cut off a bit at the top and bottom above). Typically, there's blank space at the top and bottom of the invitation - cut that part into narrow strips as well. You want to make the ornament look full, so you'll probably need some of those blank strips to fill it out.

Step 2: Curl the paper strips tightly around your finger. 

Curl them them tightly around your finger since they'll uncurl a little bit as you shimmy them into the glass ball (next step!).

Step 3: Shimmy the curled paper strips into the glass ball one at a time.

Remove the top from the glass ball so you can insert the strips. They will uncurl a little bit, but that's ok. I've tried to curl them really, really tightly and shove them in there before, but I found that that didn't work very well and you couldn't read the writing, which is pretty essential to this project!

I also find that it helps to have something to set the ornament down on in between feeding the strips into the top so that it doesn't roll around on you.

Continue feeding the strips in until you think it looks full. It'll look beautiful no matter what, trust me!

Once you finish, you'll have an ornament that looks a little something like this:

See how you can read snippets of the text from the invitation? Love that!

You can tie the ornament onto a wedding gift, or give the ornament as the gift itself. I made a couple of them for friends who got married in October and they'll be shipping out shortly! To those friends, sorry if I spoiled the surprise! :)

That wraps up (pun intended, ha!) my first handmade Christmas craft! I'm not even close to done though - more to come tomorrow for my contribution to Nap-Time Creation's A Crafty Christmas series. You may see something familiar from this post in there tomorrow :).

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