Christmas Craft: Paint-Filled Clear Ornaments

Last week, I wrote a round-up of clear ornament crafts for CAGW, primarily because I scored a couple dozen clear ornaments from a Joann's doorbuster and needed ideas for what to do with them.

My favorite, and the one that seemed the most kid-friendly (and the cheapest!), was the one that's all over Pinterest this year, with people everywhere filling their clear ornaments with acrylic paint, swirling it around, and then pouring out the excess.

It really is kid-friendly, super cheap (if you have some craft acrylics), and SUPER fun!

And it really is just that easy. You squeeze craft acrylic paint into a clear ornament--

--swirl and shake it around--

--and then set the ornament upside-down back on top of the paint bottle to drain back out:

I discovered in the process that I had some mostly-empty paints that I had bought more of but hadn't yet replaced. This is how you get out all the last dregs!

Oh, just making sure that I don't waste a single smidge of that almost-empty paint, even though I bought new ones...
Posted by Crafting a Green World on Tuesday, December 6, 2016

When Syd came to join us later (she'd been busy baking cherry bread with her grandmother), she did even more experimenting. She played around with our artist's acrylics, although she quickly discovered that it was too thick to work on its own. It did work better when she squeezed it in with a couple of colors of craft acrylics; the craft acrylics seemed to thin the artist's acrylics down enough to give it some flow, and that's how she got such lovely golds and silvers into her ornaments:

She even played with putting in glitter, and it worked great!

Although the results are gorgeous, this is actually a quite process-oriented work, and both kids (and I!) worked contentedly at it for a long time. It was very nice to swirl the colors around and watch them flow! 

We left the mixed-color ornaments to rest upside-down on top of the plastic carton that they'd come in, since of course we couldn't pour the paint back into the bottle all mixed up. After the excess had drained out, we did have to put a second coat into a couple of the ornaments, as too much paint had drained out and left empty streaks.

These ornaments also probably aren't suited to being hung in direct sunlight; the paint isn't uniformly thick, and although our ornaments all look great in our lit room, I noticed as I was taking photos that if I held them in direct sunlight, I could sort of see through some parts of some of them.

That being said, when hung on our tree they look fabulous, as if they're enameled:

Christmas colors annoy me, so I indulged myself by making several ornaments in black and grey and navy blue. You can't just go out and buy colors like that in the store!