Melted Snowman Ornaments

Now that Christmas is over, I was able to see the look on all of my families faces when I gave them their presents. This year I made all of them by hand and created a "basket" for them. If you're thinking of doing this, the best way is to hit up all of the local Goodwills and purchase tins for usually around $1. Much cheaper then actual baskets and they still look cute! And face it, whether you use baskets or tins, they'll most likely end up back at the Goodwill anyways. LOL.

Melted snowman ornament

One gift in particular that I created was melted snowman ornaments. I'm not sure if you've seen these before but my friend Sheila and I, came across these at the Victorian Country Christmas event that they do here in Tacoma every year. It's basically a large vendor fair where everyone is in Victorian clothing. It's fun to go look at all of the Christmas goods and this is usually where I try and find our personalized ornaments. I actually found really cute pirate boys and girls, and with my son being obsessed with pirates, this is what I settled on. We all have a different color hat and have our names and year written on them. They're adorable, but I digress...

So I found these ornaments and thought they were super cute and would be super easy to make. Whoever had made these ones in particular used plain old salt, but Sheila wanted to try and use glitter, so we did that. I also happened to already have a bunch of clear ball ornaments so we really didn't need to purchase too much to make these. If you plan on making these next year, you'll want to order/buy the clear ornaments early, they tend to sell out quickly.

Off to our local craft store, Michaels, to look for what we'd need. Glitter in the scrapbooking section is actually kind of expensive especially when you need a bunch and we were making 14 of them. We ended up hitting the children's section where you can purchase a large plastic bottle of it for like $5.99. Pair that with one of their 40% or 50% off coupons and it's not too bad. We also found some orange clay that we decided to use to make our snowman's noses. We attempted to find small plastic top hats but was unable to so no hats for our snowmen :/ As for the scarves, fleece would be really nice but I had a bunch of felt at home so we used that; you only need a little bit. You also will need to collect some small twigs from outside. I actually thought this was going to be hard to do but it wasn't. We have a large pine tree in our yard that had lost some of it's branches from the wind so I just pulled off a couple twigs from that. Now depending on where you live, this might be harder. I luckily live in the Pacific Northwest, so no issues with trees here. Just improvise for whatever you can find that looks like Snowman arms. Last but not least, the peppercorns for the eyes and buttons. That's it!

They clay we used

First off, you need to make your carrot noses since you need to bake them to set them. I think it was like 11 minutes or so? It says on the packaging how long. I added an extra minute or so because I didn't think they felt done because they were still quite soft but they still felt the same even then. However, once they cool down for a minute or two, they get nice and hard and solid.

You need to roll the dough into a a long rope, or worm as my son would say. Then cut off a small amount and make it into the shape of a carrot. You also need to add the carrot ridges. We tried a butter knife at first but I honestly like the corn on the cob holders that I tried the best.

Adding ridges to the carrot noses

Our cute carrot noses once they were done!

While those are baking, start filling up your ornaments with a little glitter. It helps, if you have a funnel.

 Add in 5 peppercorns for the eyes and buttons, a few twigs, and the carrot noses.

After that, you need your scarves. Take whatever fabric you have and just slice/cut into small rectangles and give a little fringe on each end. Sorry, I forgot to take pics of this. Add to the ornaments. You're done!

The only issue we've had with these is trying to keep all of the snowman parts on top of the glitter. For the most part you can just shake it up and down and everything will float to the top. The nose apparently weighs a little too much though those so that's a little harder to keep on top. 

But there you go! An easy and fun but cute, little craft!

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