My tree has gone to the dogs

Well, not really.  But I made what I think are the cutest ornaments in the shape of dog bones.

What do you think?  I am in love with them.  And they were free!

Any guesses what I made them out of?

Now who doesn’t have an egg carton in the house?  If you don’t, you probably need groceries…or have your own chickens I guess. 🙂

I had read a post about making ornaments out of construction paper, mixed with water, blended together and pressed into a cookie cutter.  But, I can’t find it again, if it was you or know who it was, please let me know, I’d love to give you full credit for the idea!

Now I don’t keep construction paper on hand, but egg cartons are basically the same, right?

I ripped it up, put it in the blender, added water and blended away.
I tried to wash the blender thoroughly after, but the spinach smoothly I made next tasted a little cardboardy.  My husband was quick to point out that they always taste cardboardy. 😉  (That’s all just a joke, except for the part about Joel thinking the spinach smoothies always taste like cardboard.  The blender is squeaky clean, however.)

I think I had to add a lot of extra water to get it to mix properly because my blender sucks the egg carton is thicker than construction paper.  So I had to press A LOT of excess water out of the mixture and was left with a few fist sized globs of wet egg carton mush.
At that point my plan was to just press my soggy carton mixture into the shapes I wanted, I was thinking hearts and stars.  You know, just nice and easy like.  But that just didn’t work out.  There was still a lot of water to be pushed out and without any sort of a mold my shapes left a lot to be desired.  As it turns out though, the only cookie cutter shape I have is a dog bone.  A regular baker I am not.  But, this little happy accident worked out perfectly.  The girls needed some tree representation.

After I pressed and pressed and pressed (so much excess water) them into the cookie cutter I punctured 2 holes to string the hanger with the tip of a pair of scissors.  I had to do it while it was still in the cookie cutter to not ruin the bone shape and I decided to only do this on the first one because I was worried that the puncturing process was messing with the bone’s structural integrity.
What is it with me and ornament structure integrity? I complained of my beaded snowflake’s lack of it here.

I figured I’d just get creative with tying a ribbon hanger around the second one and skipped making the holes.  I then brushed a light coat of glue on just the top side of each bone for added integrity security.  I figured the bottom side would be OK since it was perfectly flat and undisturbed.

Then I baked them for a bit in our toaster oven to make sure they were totally dried out and hardened.  Maybe 30 minutes on 200, or maybe it was 2 hours on 250???  I don’t remember exactly but I would say start with option 1 and cross your fingers go from there.  🙂

The tree’s color scheme seems to be red, white and silver (more specifically silver glitter) so painting candy cane stripes on the bone ornaments was something I thought I could manage with my limited skilz without screwing up AND I already had red and white paint on hand so these were falling into the totally FREE category.  Nice!

I don’t think I’ve done a budget rundown for all my homemade ornaments for the Mega Crafty Christmas Tree challenge.  The only items I have had to buy are white paint, glitter and salt for a whopping $5.91 spent.  Cha Ching!!  Everything else I have used I either already had on hand, were scraps from previous projects or natural items that haven’t cost me cent.  I’ll take A Decorated Christmas Tree for $6 please Alex.  🙂

And now, back to the bones.  After they had cooled, I painted them completely white and then added the red stripes and used a black permanent marker to add our girls names and little paw print.  I actually used what had been the bottom as the front part of the ornament, that side did turn out perfectly flat.  Hello late night, bright flashy picture.
 Down right dog gone cute I say.  🙂 I hope you like ’em as much as I do.

I only ended up using probably less than a quarter of the amount of mush that I made. But I only had the one cookie cutter and we only have the 2 dogs.  But imagine the possibilities, I’m sure a lot of you have some pretty cool cookie cutters that would make neat ornament shapes.  If anyone tries it out I’d love to see what you come up with!

I am sharing this project here, here, here and here. Check ém out!

Posted by Karah @ thespacebetweenblog on December 5, 2011

https://thespacebetweenblog.wordpress.com/2011/12/05/my-tree-has-gone-to-the-dogs/