Faux Metal Christmas Ornaments

If you’re a stamper, you’ve probably seen a lot of this technique lately for creating bold metallic die-cut sentiments…but after seeing some of the beautiful new ornament designs in the Silhouette Online Store, I thought it’d be great for making some quick Christmas ornaments as well.  The best part is you can either customize them with names or images if you’re comfortable designing with the Studio software or just download and cut one of the many designs already offered in the Store if you’re a beginner.  The supplies you’ll need are all easily found in most craft stores:

I started by cutting 4 of the same woodland deer design out of Silhouette Chipboard using the standard settings for chipboard in the Studio software.  Since this was a detailed design, I only shrunk the shape a little bit to be around five inches in diameter.

To give the ornament some dimension, I glued each of the four layers together.  Since you’ll be “sealing” the layers together with embossing powder later you don’t need a strong glue, but I like using the Zig Squeeze and Roll glue pen because it lets me draw super thin lines on my intricate die-cuts.

Next, just smash your Versamark pad all over both sides of your chipboard ornament.  I go over each area several times (and use a scrap of paper underneath) to make sure I have an even coating.

Then, sprinkle your embossing powder over the sticky ornament.  This is the Ranger “Liquid Platinum” powder…it gives you kinda an antique-y silver finish so works well for faux metal ornaments.  Make sure both sides are well covered in powder and tap the piece on your tabletop over the scrap paper to remove any excess.

Melt the powder with your heat gun.  Don’t overheat it…you’ll know its done when you see a smooth shiny finish…and continue until both sides of the whole ornament are melted.  After the piece had cooled, I did another round of Versamark, powder, and melting on both sides to achieve a super smooth metal finish.  You can continue to add as many layers of embossing as you’d like to get the finish you’re looking for.

My “Merry Christmas” ornament was not as detailed as the other, so I shrunk this design down to about four inches in diameter.  For this piece, I used gold embossing powder from Recollections.

My finished ornaments looked like this.  I tied a quick bow out of some 1/8″ satiny ribbon to use as a hanger.

These could make great tags on gifts as well…by welding someone’s name into the center of the circle border, you could even personalize them.

But, with the number of great woodland ornament designs in the Online Store right now…I’d probably be happy just making a treeful of platinum deer ornaments.

Time to go find more ornaments for my tree I think.  I hope you enjoyed this project idea and I’d love to hear your comments!