DIY Wood Slice Ornaments
With this past weekend being the Sweet Clover Holiday Kick-Off, my rear was in holiday making mode a few weeks ago, but I am of the “too soon” mindset when it comes to sharing any of those projects before Halloween on the blog. I’ve given a week long post Halloween grace period, and now I am excited to share some of the holiday ornaments I created for my space at Sweet Clover. When it comes to holiday decor I am a bit all over the place, enjoying a mix of vintage, rustic natural, and glam. I decided to embrace the rustic natural when it came to creating these DIY wood burned log slice ornaments, and let the lam and vintage come to my tree at Sweet Clover in the way of shiny vintage ornaments.
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These ornaments were relatively easy and super inexpensive to create, which are pretty much the two main criteria for me when it comes to creating Christmas decor.
Recently we had a tree lose a couple of huge limbs in storms, and I started thinking about slicing those limbs up to make ornaments. While that was a super resourceful way of thinking, I thought I would just check and see if I couldn’t find something along the lines of what I was looking for at a reasonable price. Lo and behold, Amazon had just the thing, a set of 30 wood slices with a pre-drilled hole and twine for just under $15. That’s not even 50 cents an ornament, and I already had the wood burner, so it seemed like a no-brainer to simply order those.
Materials Needed
To make these, you really only need two things…
- Predrilled wood-slices (If you make your own, you still want to predrill so you don’t have to drill into your design).
- Wood-burning tool or kit (I got mine years ago, and couldn’t find it, but this one looks awesome and has great reviews, loads of parts, and is a great price.)
The beauty of these, is you can truly pick anything you’d like to draw or create.
How to Make
I don’t have exact plans for how I drew my ornaments out, but I wanted to share some tips that will help you in creating your own.
- Keep your designs simple and lines as clean as possible as it’s very challenging to create curved lines and small details with the burning tool (at least for me, it is!).
- Draw your design with pencil on paper first and sketch it out a few times until you’re confident that you have the drawing of it down pat. Then lightly pencil it onto your wood slice before burning.
- If you know what you want to make, but cannot for the life of you figure out how to draw it, do a google image search for a simple drawing of that item.
As you can see, most of mine have relatively clean lines. I also made some with words that were simple and easy to burn, such as these “Wild & Free” ornaments.
I stuck with an outdoor adventure kind of theme, with the pine trees show above, as well as the little mountain scene. This one looks a little more detailed but if you look closely, you can see that most of these lines are simple straight lines.
After I created all of these, I was feeling a little more adventurous with my skills and decided I wanted to create a couple of vintage camper ornaments. They’re so popular right now, and to be honest, I dream of one day owning one. Of course, with another mouth to feed on the way, my vintage camper dreams will happen when I am 90 if I’m lucky, but that’s OK. 😉 I had never drawn a vintage camper and wasn’t sure I could do it, but I really wanted to make some.
I searched google images for vintage camper clipart and found several options. I didn’t draw one exactly as it was but took features of a few, and drew out my design on paper a few times. Once I felt comfortable with drawing the camper, I sketched it lightly on my wood slice and burned it in. As you can see, it’s imperfect and the curved lines are more challenging to burn, but I am really happy with how it turned out.
These did fairly well this past weekend at Sweet Clover, and I plan to make a few more before the next sale. Next Christmas, I’ll be styling the cottage at Sweet Clover, and I’ve got plans to make many more and create a rustic glam Christmas cabin kind of feel. Of course that’s over a year away, but the next year’s going to be busy so I better start planning while I have time!
