DIY Christmas Book Ornament

This is my contribution to the Christmas Pintester  Movement. The Pintester Movement is run by Sonja Foust of the Pintester blog. Sonja is awesome and hysterical and you should go check out her blog. It will change your life, especially if you find dirty jokes amusing and enjoy penis crafts.

 Yay me!

This time we were supposed to make a Christmas ornament! If it turned out we didn’t need anymore ornaments or didn’t decorate for Christmas, no worries! We were invited to send our ornament to Jodee at Cheeseblarg.

I was actually pretty excited about this one and went to town pinning ideas to my crafting board on Pinterest. In the end I decided on this lovely ball.

DIY Christmas Book Page Ornament from Diary of a Fit Mommy!

I decided to put my own spin on it by making it Harry Potter themed. The first step was to get me some ornaments. This turned out to be easier said then done. I had to try three different stores before I could find ornaments that were ball shaped, smooth and any color vaguely related to Harry Potter. They were all either ridged, funky shaped or funky colored…or part of giant economy packages of eight bazillion balls. Since I wasn’t willing to go into debt for this project, I kept looking. Who knew it was so hard to find smooth, normal balls?

Anyway…I eventually found a package of silver ornaments for $5 and some cute little blue bows (Ravenclaw FTW!) and got down to business!

As you can see, some of my balls were shiny and some were matte. I chose a matte one because I wasn’t sure what the Mod Podge would do to a shiny ball.

The next step was to cut up some book pages (sob). Luckily (?) I already had a mutilated copy of The Sorcerer’s Stone to work with from my washer necklace project. I pulled a few relevant pages and sliced them up.

The instructions call for Elmer’s glue but I just pulled out my trusty Mod Podge! I also decided to attach all the strips from top to bottom so they could be read.

Here is the finished project pre-drying…

as you can see, my sub par motor skills got in the way again and the Mod Podge got everywhere. It’s all good though as it will mostly be covered by the blue bow. I did end up putting a top coat on as well.

After it all dried I attached the bow and hanger and ended up with this:

Another view:

I liked how it came out overall and I will be keeping it (sorry Jodee!). The strips of paper are not entirely smooth and I am not sure if it’s because of the Mod Podge for Elmer’s substitution or the placement of the strips. Regardless I am glad I placed them that way because you can read the quotes and it makes the geek in me happy 🙂 As for the use of an alternate adhesive, I didn’t have any Elmer’s so there was no helping that! The ball looks more covered in the pin but I wanted the silver to show through because Ravenclaw.

And yes I know that Ravenclaw colors are actually blue and bronze but give me a break…after three stores I was happy to settle for movie colors!