Almost Christmas.

Hooray for Christmas!  I hope everyone is having a wonderful holiday!

  My family always does a Secret Santa exchange for Christmas, where we pick a random name out of a hat and we have to make or get a present for them.  The past few years we've had a theme or item that we're supposed to give the person we pick.  One year it was a pair of socks (which was actually really fun.  I got my Dad some pretty nifty socks that made me think of him. ha), last year it was a journal, whether hand made or bought, and THIS year the present isss..... ORNAMENTS!

There are so many DIY ornament ideas out there, I had no idea where to start.  Since there are quite a few book worms in my family.... I thought this would be a pretty good idea.

It's just a plastic ball ornament with cut-up book pages mod-podged onto it.  Super easy!

Here are my tools.

1. Simple ball ornament.

2. Mod-Podge.

3. An old book- I found one at Goodwill for cheap.

4. Paintbrush- for the modge-podge.

5. Scissors- to cut the pages.

I did use an empty bottle from some sparkling grape juice to hold my precious ornament while it was drying.  My roommates had used a while ago and it was sitting around, all lonely like, so I figured I'd put it to good use!

I also made some other ornaments... I had seen this idea on Pinterest and thought it looked like fun.

I just took some plastic animals from a tube I bought at Michael's craft store and spray painted them.  Some of them I even covered in glitter.  Gotta love some glitter!

It looks like the evil queen's garden from Narnia...

I decided to tie a ribbon around each animal and then stick a little hook under the ribbon to hold them up on the tree.  There are probably better ways to do this, but this was all that I had and it worked well enough for me.

There were so many different tubes of animals at Michael's.  There were dinosaurs, coral reef creatures, pets, and even cars and trains, Native American figures, Egyptian figures, etc.  The possibilities are endless! I used jungle animals :)

To make them glittery:  After the spray paint dried, I brushed mod-podge all over the animals, then quickly put them in an empty spaghetti jar that had some glitter in it, and shook it up!  I didn't have a large amount of glitter in the jar, but just enough to be able to coat each animal well.

It was lots of fun and easy.  I hope the recipients of these little ornaments enjoy them :)

Love this little monkey.

I spy with my little eye....