DIY Tiny Christmas Ornaments/Christmas Tree Mantel

This year, I decided to change up my mostly red/white/gold/silver Christmas décor by adding a bit of turquoise.  After adding some homemade turquoise pillow covers to the living room this summer, I have really been enjoying the combination of turquoise with my red coral pillows.  We can only have small trees on our mantle due to a certain kitty cat that loves to chew on pine needles (real or fake) and then puke them up on our carpet.  Yeah, you fellow cat owners will sympathize.  Woolite carpet cleaning spray is the bomb, just saying…
So the search for small turquoise ornaments began.  No dice.  Everywhere I looked, nothing!  As you may have noticed, I am a frugal decorator.  I cannot stand to spend tons of money on something I know I can create on a dime.  I did pick up an eight foot length of pretty beaded garland from Lowes that had the colors I liked.  Using that as inspiration, my solution was to DIY some new ornaments.  Enter the craft supplies!  I raided my craft stash and just so happened to have the perfect color scrapbook papers and ribbons for my vision:

I created a cutting template in my Silhouette software to cut one inch circles with a perforation down the center of each for folding.  All I had to do was click cut and voila!  Lots of little circles easily folded in the center:

I grabbed a glass of wine, sat down at my desk, turned on some music and got my craft on!  It is a tedious little craft, but I tend to enjoy letting go of serious thoughts and just enjoying the process.  I used my low temp glue gun to assemble six folded circles with a folded piece of ribbon cut to five inches in the center for hanging:

Do you remember making these little guys with glue and construction paper as a kid?  Do you remember that one kid in class that always ate said glue?  Ha!  I remember always grabbing crayons to decorate mine while most of the other kids just went with plain paper.  I guess some things never change, because I couldn’t just leave the cut edges of these ornaments bare!  I grabbed a few Martha Stewart glitter glue pens and went to town:

I think they add just the right little bit of color that I was looking for this year:  

I think our little silver Rudolph is enjoying the new ornaments!  ;-)
2014 has flown by!  I still can’t believe Thanksgiving is gone already.  Are you getting into the holiday spirit yet?  Happy Friday Everyone!
Have a great weekend!
Cheers!
M J