Since I am fairly short on money this year and I gave away most of my Christmas ornaments before the move so they wouldn’t break in the truck thing, I have been trying to figure out how to make Christmas beautiful but budget-friendly. Sooooo I turned to pinterest, obviously. I saw a lot of cute cinnamon ornament ideas, but I didn’t like the idea of doing hearts or Christmas trees or stars because, well, I’m not sure. Maybe too cheesy? Maybe too cliché? Whatever my reasons, I decided to make the ornaments following a different trend…owls!!
These are super easy to make, they just take a little bit of time. While most cinnamon ornament recipes use just applesauce and cinnamon, but Martha Stewart, in this tutorial , uses craft glue as well. I decided to
to make these, you need:
- 4 ounces of applesauce
- a 4.25 ounces container of cinnamon (a little more than a cup)\
- 4 ounces of craft glue (I used Elmer’s)
- about 2 tablespoons of water
1. mix the cinnamon and applesauce together. You can use a spatula, but I found it more efficient to use my fingers to rub in the applesauce to the cinnamon, the same method you would use to make delish scones. Essentially, just rub the cinnamon and applesauce together between your fingers and thumbs to make sure the ingredients are fully incorporated. It should be crumbly but should form a ball if you clenchhit together in your fist.
2. add the glue! You’ll want to rub it in again. At this pint, the cinnamon mixture gets a spongy texture that makes a weird squish/squeak noise when you rub it. After the glue is added in, add the water too. Work it through until your dough is moist, but still breaks apart into pieces. It will look like this:
3. Now, cover it with some plastic wrap and let it sit for ONE HOUR. Martha has this step, but I’m not sure why. I suppose you could skip it if you wanted to, though.
4. roll out the dough in between two pieces of plastic wrap. To do this, you’ll have to squish it together SUPER firmly between the sheets. I found the best way was to roll it out super thin then fold the edges into the center and roll it out again. If your dough gets too dry, spray it with some water. If it is too sticky, which is unlikely, sprinkle on some dry cinnamon. You want to get it to 1/4 inch thick then CUT it!! To make the owl shapes, I took an empty can and squished it a bit to make it oval. Cut the ovals overlapping a it to make the little owl ears.
5. This step is VERY IMPORTANT!! Once you cut out all the owls, you need to remember to make the string holes. I did it with a straw, but you can use a skewer instead. You could even use a pencil if you don’t have anything else on hand. The most IMPORTANT thing is, DO IT!! If you don’t you will have a bunch of adorable owl shaped tokens, but not ornaments.
6. Now. You can either let them sit for 24 hours to dry, or, if you are a little more impatient like me, the less long way is to bake these at 200 for 2 hours. It is still long, but a little less long. Make sure the oven rack is in the middle or the top, and flip the owls after 1 hour. after the 2 hours, let them cool all the way and then you can paint them!!
I painted some of mine in a retro 60’s green-purple-blue combo, and I think they are SO cute!!
I did some a little more rustic, using just gold paint and a little bit of glitter glue for accents. I think they are perfect Christmas ornaments!
I did a few with gold glitter covering them and then white paint. The white paint was a little too bold, so I put the gold paint overtop the white on the one on the left. I like it mixed like that : )
FINALLY, I was getting SO TIRED of painting, so I did an impressionist one. I guess I should warn you…if you do lots of detail on your owls, they might take awhile. It took me SEVEN HOURS (!!!) to paint all of these.
7. Finally, find some coordinating string or ribbon and string them up! I haven’t yet, unfortunately, but I have some turquoise embroidery thread for the colored ones and some twine for the gold ones.
Enjoy your cute little owls!! They make great gifts or just keep them for yourself! Have fun! : )
One batch of dough makes 12-15 ornaments. You can see that I painted more than that, but I made more than one batch.
No comments:
Post a Comment