Snowflake Christmas Ornament {Using Clothespins}

For a while, my mom and I had a tradition of making a Christmas ornament every year.  Now that I’ve moved out of my parents’ house we don’t do that anymore, but I still enjoy making ornaments (and hopefully within the next couple of years Mom and I will get to make an ornament together, too).  I found a tutorial for making these snowflake ornaments on Pinterest and decided this was going to be one of my homemade ornaments this year.

Don’t get me wrong, I love projects that take a long time, but this ornament was nice because it only took about an hour from start to finish and required only a few materials to make.

Materials:

• Clothespins: mini or regular sized.  I used mini, but the tutorial I referenced early used standard-sized

• Stain: I used Minwax Dark Walnut

• Hot glue gun and glue

• Ribbon: Here’s the ribbon I used

Making the Ornament

You will need 8 full clothespins for each ornament. Start out by separating the metal part of the clothespin from the wood part. (Side note: Do the little metal springs remind anyone else of an old-fashioned mousetrap?) Stain your clothespin pieces with whatever stain you have chosen.  I stained the top and the sides first, let that dry, then stained the bottom.  Since perfection in staining wasn’t essential in this project, I used a sponge brush to brush the stain on and then a paper towel to wipe off the excess stain. Give your pieces about half an hour to dry (it’s not critical that they’re completely dry). Hot glue two pieces together with the straight sides facing each other.  Make eight of these for each of the “spokes” of your snowflake. Glue two of the spokes together horizontally.  You will be gluing the fatter, rounded ends together.  Put a generous amount of glue on one of the ends….you can always peel off the excess later. Next, glue two more spokes to the completed spokes (essentially turning a minus sign into a plus sign).  Again, add a liberal amount of hot glue.  It will feel a little unstable, but when you put the other spokes in, it will stabilize a little more. Now, glue the remaining four spokes between the already completed spokes (the plus sign).  You made need to play around with this a little to get it so that the ornament is stable.  If you need to, peel off one or multiple spokes and reglue.  It’s not going to be the sturdiest ornament, but the end product should have some stability to it. Cut your ribbon to about 6 inches.  Decide which side is the side you want showing and flip the ornament over so that side is face-down.  Add a pea-sized dot of glue on the middle of the snowflake and glue one end of your ribbon.  Loop the ribbon and glue the other end on top of the first end.  Cut remaining ribbon if there is extra. And that’s it!  Pretty easy, huh?  I can’t wait to add this to our collection of Christmas ornaments.