Photo Craft - Christmas Tree Baubles

Crafting with your Photos - Making Christmas Baubles

Christmas lights are now up in town centres, December is approaching and I've seen a few sneaky early Christmas decorations.  It's a month today!  Yikes!

On the run up to Christmas, I've been thinking about how I can incorporate photographs into decorations and gifts.  I have a pile of square photographs printed from my Instagram posts during 2013 (around 300 odd!) and I wondered if I could make use of some of them.  Then I came across this idea of creating photograph baubles in a marketing email from a photo printer, so I gave it a go.  Here's what I did.

I gathered myself a few craft supplies - glue, craft paper, bakers twine (or string), scissors, pencil, a circular lid for a stencil and of course, some photographs.  I bought the glue, twine and craft paper, knowing that I wanted to make various things with them so they'd come in useful and be more cost efficient.

Using the plastic lid as a template, I drew and cut 2 photos into circles and 2 circles of craft paper.

Folding all of the circles in half (and being careful that the photographs were folded in the right way so that the photos would hang the right way up rather than at an angle), I then applied glue to the first half.

Then I stuck each photo to the two halves of craft paper to create the bauble, gluing a loop of twine in the middle for hanging before sticking the last piece.

I'm really pleased with how they turned out and can't wait to get them on our tree once I decorate (we wait until December in our house).  As they dried, the sides did curl a bit from the glue - it may be that using a different type of glue would prevent this, but I like that it gives the baubles more of a quirky shape.  I love the idea of having handmade decorations and incorporating photographs, making them really personal for our family.  

I'm going to be sharing more crafty Christmas photo ideas over the next few weeks, so if you're interested, keep a look out and let me know if you have any ideas of your own, or if you give these baubles a go.  You could create them with your kids drawings instead of photographs.