Shaken Paint Christmas Ornaments

(E was 2 years and 1 month old.)

You’ll need: 

• Transparent fillable Christmas ornaments.
• Squeezable paint (like tempera or acrylic).
• Glitter glue or regular glitter (optional).
                     

The short story: Open ornaments, squeeze paint inside, close up ornaments, shake well, add more paint as desired.

How it worked for us:

E enjoyed this project immensely. I mean, she loved it to bits. She could’ve done it all day, and for weeks after, she’d ask to make more ornaments.

She really got into squeezing the paint into one half of the ornaments, shaking it (once I’d put it back together), putting in more paint, etc.

Even our Papa got interested in what we were doing, asked for some of the ornaments, and made his own! He tried making certain patterns and actually succeeded with some of them.

A true family Christmas craft with great results 🙂 E also really enjoyed seeing them on our Christmas tree and kept saying that she’d made them.

What I learned:

• It was really a huge success with everyone at our house – would definitely do again.
• We used tempera paint, and while we did have a small amount of the paint slipping down over time, it really wasn’t as bad as mentioned in the link that inspired me. It definitely didn’t slip enough to detract from the effect of the technique. The colors still looked very nice after two weeks, and I have no reason to believe that they’ve gotten worse packed away in our Christmas boxes.
• If you use glitter glue, be aware that it doesn’t run as much as the paint, so you may have better results if you apply the glitter glue first, ensuring the glitter shows well on the outside. Regular glitter should be mixed into the paint.
• The mixing of colors on the inside actually almost looks nicer than the outside, so we left part of the last ornament blank for a view of the inside. I didn’t get a good photo of that, although you can sort of see the blank area in the center ornament in the last photo.

Note: If you want to stick to a color scheme for your ornaments, simply just put out the colors that match, and your toddler won’t know the difference. We just used whatever we had, and the black ended up showing a bit more than some people may prefer.

The idea:

I was inspired to use shaken paint with E when I first saw this post on Painting in Bottles.

Shortly after, I happened to find transparent fillable ornaments at a local store, and it hit me that they would be perfect for this technique, with the added bonus that we’d have kid made ornaments to hang on our tree.