I am so thrilled to be a contributor in this year’s Creative Christmas Countdown!!  24 festive holiday crafts and activities brought to you by 24 fab Kid Bloggers, delivered daily to your inbox from now until December 24th!  Click HERE to subscribe to the countdown and receive your daily activity!

Before I share my craft with you, I just want to take a moment to thank Alissa from Creative with Kids and Maggy from Red Ted Art, for all of their hard work behind the scenes and their dedication to making it all happen!  Thanks, ladies!  You rock!

And now, I bring you Day NINE’s festive holiday craft!

My inspiration for these Styrofoam Ornaments came from these gorgeous earthenware stars over at Folksy.  As soon as I laid eyes on them, I had to figure out a way that we could make some of our own here!

You can do this craft with children of any age, from toddler right up through teenager.  I had a lot of fun creating these myself!

Ok, let’s get down to business!  You’re going to love how easy this is, how simple the material list is!

Here’s what you’ll need:

• Styrofoam meat tray (always run your trays through the dishwasher (bottom rack) to sterilize them)
• Acrylic craft paint  (colours of your choice)
• Glitter glue in a co-ordinating colour
• golf tee or sharp white pencil crayon (both work well, but the golf tee is easier to control)
• ribbon or thread for hanging

Those are the only materials I used for making the pink star and the purple heart that you’ll see in this post.

And here’s what you’re going to do:

1. Cut festive shapes out of your styrofoam meat tray.  (cookie cutters are good to trace for this kind of thing or you can just wing it and go free-hand).
2. With your white pencil or golf tee, make designs all over the front of your ornament.  Get creative and have some fun with it!  Squiggles, swirls, wavy lines and dots are all great.

If you’re working with a younger crowd, you may want to provide some simpler tools for “carving” with.  A play-dough pizza cutter, a straight ruler, and the handle of a paint brush all make interesting designs, and they may be easier for little hands to hold and manipulate.

In the next photo you’ll see a simple but really cute design that I made using only the play dough pizza cutter and a golf tee.

 3. Give your ornament a coat of paint.   Be sure to paint the edges of the ornament (which I forgot to do for the purple heart), and wiggle your paintbrush to get the paint into all of the carved dots and crevices.  You can have some fun at this point by flipping it over and doing some stamping to take off any excess paint.

Let your ornament dry.  (a hairdryer is a very handy thing to keep in the craft room if you want to speed up the drying process)

4.  Now the magic begins!  Squirt on a generous blog of glitter glue and using a paint brush, spread that around your ornament and work it into your carvings.  You want the glitter to kind of accumulate in the carvings a bit so that your design “pops”.  Note: I only have purple and blue glitter glue so I painted the ornaments with colours would allow the coloured glitter to stand out.  I used the purple glitter glue on the purple heart and pink star, and I used the blue glitter glue on the green trees.

And that, my friends, is all there is to it!

Poke a hole through the top with your golf tee or pencil crayon, and loop some ribbon or metallic thread through so you can hang this little gem on your Christmas tree!

Now, wasn’t that easy?  And fun?  And aren’t they going to look fantastic on your Christmas tree?