One of my personal favorite Christmas styles is the rustic country farmhouse look. I knew I wanted to make some beautiful hand made ornaments but my inspiration for the wooden disks came for a catalog called LTD Commodities the were selling a set of for for $8.99. They were adorable little ornaments but I knew I wanted mine to be more personal and I also didn’t want to pay $8.99 plus shipping for 4 ornaments. So I decided to make my own and the cost $0.
I started this project by looking through some old logs we had out back of our property from a tree that recently fell. I soon found one with a small branch about 2.5″ in diameter and decided that would be perfect. I took out a ruler and with a pencil marked the branch in 2″ intervals and with a regular hand saw cut about 15 disks from the branch.
*Now a quick tip if you don’t have a log pile around just take a nature walk at a local park or wooded area for hiking and find a nice 2″ -3″ branch and use that if you want to keep with the $0 cost but you can buy unfinished wooden disks on at any local craft store and of course on Amazon.com or Wish.com.
After I had my disks cut I cleaned and sanded them thoroughly to ensure a good surface for painting.
The next step was naturally figuring out what I wanted to decorate them with keeping to the country theme and my love of the little red trucks I decided to do different deer heads, and red trucks on them and I even personalized one. I did a google search for some clipart images I liked and first drew the design on the disks
* Now I drew mine free hand but if you’re not confident in your drawing skills I have a trick for that. Simply save the image to your phone or tablet, then take a piece of paper and place it over the disk and with a pencil mark the paper where the top, bottom, and sides of the disk are, than go to your saved image place the marked paper over your phone or tablet, adjust the image till it is centered between the marks and trace it. Once you have the image traced turn the paper over and with the pencil heavily color the entire back of the image making sure that if you touched it you would get it on your hand. Now place the heavily colored side on the disk and trace the image again. Remove the paper and there you have it the design you wish to paint.
After your designs are drawn it just a matter of painting them. I used Apple Barrel acrylic craft paints for mine and it’s honestly the paint I use for all of my projects. I get mine in 18 bottle sets on Amazon.com but you can get them at any craft store as well by the bottle. After they were dry I simply added a thin layer of clear coat. I used Rustoleum clear coat for any surface in an aerosol can but you can use any clear coat you have or even opt out of this step. I bought my clear coat at my local Wal-Mart for several other projects so one can goes a long way.
After they dried I simply drilled a tiny hole into each one and used some twine I got in a 3 roll pack at the Dollar Tree so that the ornaments could hang. I was very pleased with the finshed product and it only took me about 2 hours from start to finish and the best part it was absolutely FREE I just used materials I already had plenty of on hand.
I hope this inspires y’all to go out and make a couple for yourself and most of all have fun doing it.
Mobster Designs 