Easy Christmas Tree Photo Ornament

I love the spirit of the season of December, when family members cook, bake, and do art projects. In my household, we are busy like Santa's elves with holiday newsletters, cooking for potlucks, making gifts for family and friends. We also give out photos of the family, and we vary it every year. Last year, we made Christmas Tree ornaments with family photo. They are very easy to make.

Here are the supplies that you will need:

Scissors

Cardboard

Pencil

Cardstock Paper (color of your choosing)

Couple of Punches

Family Photo

Glue

Glue Stick

Glitter

Silver Gel Pen

Small Hole Punch

Pretty Ribbon

Christmas or Seasonal Stickers (optional)

Old Christmas Card Decoration (optional)

1. Order 4" x 6" photos of your family (in multiple quantities if you have a lot of folks in mind or you can print them out onto photo paper), making sure that your family members are not too tiny in them. However, they also have to fit within a 3.5 or 4 inches diameter of a circle.

2. Make two cardboard templates. Whatever size photo circle you use, then make one that adds 1/4 incles to each side of the circle. Thus, a 4-inch photo circle template will have a second template that is 4-1/2 inch diameter. If you want a child to write out the message, you might want to add 1/2 inch on each side for a circle template that is 5 inches in diameter. You can find a variety of cans such as a tuna can or tomato sauce and trace your circle onto the cardboard. Using your templates, you can cut out your photo circles and cardstock papers. For a perfect look, you can use Sizzix machine or some other type of die cut machine and make your circles.

3. Glue the photo onto the cardstock.

(Optional) You can recycle Christmas Card decoration on the other side of the cardstock circle.

4. Decorate with punched shapes. In the example, we used flower and dove punches.

5. To add more decoration, we dabbed a few drops of glue and added silver glitters.

6. Using a gel pen, you can write messages.

7. You can add more stickers. In our case, we had this photo taken by a stranger at Disneyland and they were random people in the background. So, I decided to add stickers to cover them up.

8. Punch a hole using a small hole punch on top center of your cardstock circle.

9. Add a pretty ribbon and placing the ends together, tie a neat knot. Choose your ribbon to be proportional to your photo tree ornament and the hole that you punch.

Same Idea For Gift Tags

If you are going to give a present directly to a person, your tree ornament can be a gift tag as well. Or, you can make smaller photo circles for the gift tags. For gift tags, it would make more sense to print out your photos because you want to have the family fit into a smaller circle. What I use is a software program called Publisher where I can crop a circle around the family and then duplicate the same photo throughout the page. You end up with rows of your photo circles, then print, and cut.

The Christmas Tree photo ornament is an easy project for small kids, and they can make them to give to their relatives and friends.