Collage and Glue: A simply elegant (sort of) ornament

Holy moley, December is almost half over.  That is bananas.  But awesome for you, since we’re on day TEN of our 12 Days of Strange ornament tutorials.  Start the parade!  Cue the dancing girls!  Clean up the elephant poop!

Today I’m going to show you how to turn plain glass ornaments into something unique using little more than tissue paper and a hot glue gun.  WOOO!

 

Step ONE:  The tissue

There is really no limit as to what you can do at this point.   There are printed papers, plain papers, papers with glitter, zebra print, whatever your heart desires.  You can do them a plain color and then dry brush with metallic paint when it’s done.  You can stencil on your papers.  Do what you like!

This part is easy (actually the whole tutorial is easy), just tear your tissue paper into pieces and glue it onto your ornament using your glue of choice.  You can use Mod Podge, white glue, gel medium, whatever.  I use a mixture of gel medium, white glue, and water.

Step TWO:  The hot glue

 

Mod Podge recently came out with silicone molds that are designed to be used with their new line of glue sticks, which are supposedly just Mod Podge in hot glue form.  A couple of years ago I ordered some silicone molds off Etsy, and I haven’t really done anything with them because they’re a pain to use with polymer clay.  When I found out about the Mod Podge molds, I was SUPER CRAZY EXCITED thinking maybe I could use the same technique with my molds.  You should be able to find the Mod Podge molds at any craft store – I got mine from Amazon since I live in the boonies. 😉

The only problem with this whole idea is that I refuse to buy the Mod Podge glue sticks.  I decided to try it out with my regular old cheapo glue gun.   Sacrifice in the name of science!  I filled the molds with exacting precision.  WINK.

Wait 10 minutes, and then release them from the molds.  This tutorial has a lot of rum-sipping time.

The regular glue gun CLEARLY works.  Ha.  Ha ha.  Okay.  Ahem.  Use some tiny scissors and trim off any extra glue (if you are sloppy like me) and remove any obnoxious glue strings.

Since they’re clear, we gotta paint them up.  I used spray paint since I figured it would give me the smoothest finish:

And then aged them by brushing with watered-down Van Dyke brown paint:

Once that’s dry and your ornaments are dry, glue them on!  The benefit of using these kind of frames is that they’re flexible, so you can make them fit the form of your ornament if you want.  Glue the frames to the ornaments and then fill them with whatever you want, like a picture of your niece, a key and some gears if you’re steampunk crazy, some random words:

Or something a little weirder:

For this one, I used the border mold, cut it into pieces, and glued them around the top:

I also dry brushed each piece with a little metallic gold paint.  Sparkles!  WOO!