Homemade Christmas items bond families

By SUSAN DUNLAP

MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS

FORT WORTH, Texas — I have absolutely no justification for this project. Christmas ornaments are, by definition, ornamental.

They are shiny, gaudy harbingers of a sometimes shiny, gaudy holiday. But I wanted to find a Christmas project I could work on with my 9-year-old daughter, Emma Grace. I know that someday she will hang our creations on her own tree and remember our time together.

This project is quite user-friendly in that all the supplies used are nontoxic and easy to find at the crafts store. We kept our designs fairly simple, choosing to work with dots and stripes for the majority of the project.

Embellished glass ornaments

Materials:

1 roll Terrifically Tacky 1⁄4-inch-wide double-stick tape (also in the scrapbooking section)

Glass Christmas ornaments in various colors, shapes and sizes

Glitter in various colors

2 artists’ brushes, liner size

3-D Glue dots (in the scrapbooking section of a crafts store)

Craft knife

Parchment paper

1 package pink flocking

1bottle white acrylic glass paint (we used PermEnamel air-drying glass paint)

U Apply the tape to the ornament in the design of your choice. The tape is somewhat repositionable should you make a mistake. (The double-stick tape we used is much tackier than the kind you find at the office-supply store and worked very well.)

U Once all the lines are in place, peel the protective film from the tape and, using a light tapping motion on the bottle of glitter, pour small amounts of glitter onto the sticky tape. To completely cover the tape’s surface, press extra glitter onto the tape, then tap off the excess. You may want to use a soft paintbrush to lightly flick any bits of glitter from the surface.

U Position the glue dots onto the ornament. Dealing with the uber-sticky dots can be troublesome, so we used the point of a craft knife to pop the dot off its paper roll and placed it onto the ornament.

Then, to press the dot onto the glass, we used a square piece of parchment paper. We covered our work surface with parchment paper in case we needed to set down our works in progress.

U We applied a different color of glitter onto the glue dots, pressing it into the glue to ensure full coverage, and tapped off the excess.

U We used the same tape technique for the more sublime green ornaments with a pink stripe, using flocking. One note: The flocking is like ultrafine dryer lint, and we learned the hard way that lip gloss and glasses of iced tea should be removed before working with it.

U For the purple snowflake ornaments, we began with six thin lines of white paint — if you are uncomfortable working with the paint, very thin lined paint markers are fine. To keep the ornaments steady, we balanced them on an overturned cap from a bottle of water.

U We added dots and swishes to the lines to complete the one-of-a-kind character that all snowflakes possess. (Work quickly to wipe away any errant strokes with a damp paper towel. Once the paint dries, it may come off with acetone-based solvents; however, it may also remove the color of the ornament.)