How to Make DIY Glitter Christmas Ornaments – The Best Way!
This is the easiest way to make DIY glitter ornaments! Plus, six fun design ideas and how to apply vinyl to ornaments.
I love making homemade ornaments! And these DIY glitter Christmas ornaments are so satisfying to make. Don’t blame me if you become addicted.
If you’re like me and you keep buying clear ornaments from the craft store when they go on clearance after Christmas, this is a great way to use them.
I’m sure you’ve seen similar glitter ornaments floating around, but this is definitely the easiest way to make them. Plus, if you need some design inspiration or struggle applying vinyl to round surfaces, this tutorial is for you!
You’re going to love how these ornaments sparkle on your Christmas tree!
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What you need to make glitter ornaments
- clear glass ornaments or clear plastic ornaments, round or disc shaped: You can find these at almost any craft store near the Christmas season. Apparently I wanted to tempt fate with a toddler in my house so I went with glass. 😜
- fine glitter in various colors (you can also experiment with chunky glitter, but you’ll most likely have the best results with fine)
- Polycrylic clear finish
- a syringe (I’m just using an old medicine syringe which I’m now donating to crafts)
- small disposable cups
- small funnel or piece of paper
- scrap paper to protect your table and collect glitter
- permanent vinyl
- weeding tool and scraper
- transfer tape
- alcohol wipes
- parchment paper, optional
- a Cricut machine: I’m using my Cricut Joy Xtra, which is such a fun machine and the perfect size for crafts like this! Any Cricut Explore or Maker will work as well.
- ribbon or other embellishments and hot glue, optional
- paper towels (you might not need them but it’s not a bad idea to have them on hand just in case)
What’s the best glue for glitter ornaments?
Polycrylic is overwhelmingly the most popular glue for glitter ornaments and most crafters will tell you it’s the best. It’s easily found at your local home improvement store and is inexpensive considering how long a small can of polycrylic lasts. I also find it’s very easy to work with and gives great coverage.
I have also used Beacon’s Glitter-It! and it does a pretty good job (it should, since it’s made for this exact purpose!). I have noticed more splotchy areas on my ornaments using Glitter-It!, however.
Other methods of making these DIY glitter Christmas ornaments that I either haven’t tried or don’t recommend use Mod Podge, Elmer’s glue, floor wax or floor cleaner, or Aleene’s Craft Glaze. I think I’ll just stick with Polycrylic since I know it works!
Can you mix glitter colors?
Yes! To get the perfect shade of brown for my gingerbread girl ornament, I mixed a lighter golden brown with a dark brown. Just mix in a small cup first and funnel into your ornament as shown below. Feel free to experiment with mixing your glitter colors!
How to make glitter DIY Christmas ornaments
Coat ornament with polycrylic
Carefully remove the top from your ornament and set aside. Fill your syringe with 5 mL of polycrylic and dispense it inside of the ornament (sounds so clinical, haha).
Rotate the ornament on its side to spread the polycrylic around, gradually tipping it more and more upside down until it’s all the way coated. Once you get to the top of the ornament, flip it upside down over a small cup and rotate a couple more times to make sure the top is coated.
Set the ornament in the cup and allow it to drain for just a minute or two (I just wait until it’s mostly stopped dripping). You can reuse this excess polycrylic for your next ornament or pour it back in the can.
Fill ornament with glitter
Using a funnel (or a small piece of paper folded to make a funnel), fill the ornament with glitter and rotate to coat the inside. This is the best part! The glitter sticks beautifully to the polycrylic, which is so satisfying to watch. (Even my son loved watching and told me “Ahh…I’m so proud of you for making this, mom!”)
If needed, you can place a scrap of paper over the ornament’s opening and gently shake to distribute the glitter. If you still have gaps without glitter, dump a little bit of extra glitter in and shake around some more. The round/spherical ornaments will use more glitter than the disc ornaments (about half one of my little glitter containers for one round ornament).
Turn the ornament upside down to dump out the excess glitter, either over a cup or a small piece of paper. (I just used a piece of paper and then used it as a funnel to pour the glitter back in my small container.)
Allow the ornament to dry for a few hours or overnight, then you can carefully place the top back on.
An empty egg carton makes a great stand for your ornaments while drying, especially the disc ornaments. You can also keep the original packaging for the round ornaments and let them rest in that while drying.
Since the glitter’s on the inside, you don’t have to wait for it to be completely dry before decorating the outside. I believe polycrylic is cured after 24 hours, but it won’t matter when you apply the vinyl.
Add vinyl decoration
Design/edit the project
If you wish to add vinyl decoration to the outside of the ornaments, open my Glitter Christmas Ornaments project in Cricut Design Space (or you can create your own). My project includes the following designs:
- snowman
- Santa cam
- gingerbread girl
- Let It Snow
- monogram/name
Unfortunately, I am unable to share the Grinch project with you since I uploaded the image myself. You can easily upload your own Grinch SVG or image* to Design Space to make this one, though!
*Full disclosure…I totally took a screenshot of a Grinch face image and uploaded it so I didn’t have to pay for one (I’m only using this design for personal use anyway). It’s easy to remove the background with the tools when you upload–just click the white area of the background to remove it. Then I used the new Multiple Layers feature (which is a Cricut Access feature) to separate my design by colors. This just enabled me to separated the black part of the Grinch face, but the yellow layer wasn’t accurate, so I just deleted that after uploading and created my own shape from the Cricut image library to make the yellow eyes. If you don’t have access to the Multiple Layers feature, just upload an image that only has the black face outline and you can upload the image as a Single Layer for cutting.
If needed, resize the designs to fit your ornament size.** My ornaments are about 3.5 inches in diameter for reference, so that’s how big I made my guide circles in the designs. You will need to delete or hide those circles before cutting your project.
**My gingerbread girl design just barely fit on my ornament, so I resized that one slightly smaller for you in the Design Space project.
Cut the vinyl
Click Make. Choose On Mat, For any material. Click Confirm.
You can make any positioning adjustments that you need to on the Prepare screen. If you’re using less-than-full sheets of vinyl, match up your images here to where your scrap material will be on the mat. If you’re making the name ornament, just make sure that your script text looks like it’ll be cutting all as one piece (but I believe Design Space is doing that automatically now so there’s no need to have united or welded your letters together first).
Click Continue. Make sure your machine is plugged in and turned on. Choose your material settings for whatever vinyl you’re using. Load your material onto a StandardGrip cutting mat and load into your machine. Follow the Design Space prompts to cut all your pieces.
Weed the vinyl
Cut out around each piece, saving unused vinyl for other projects. Using a weeding tool, weed your pieces so you’re left with only the images on the backing.
I absolutely love my Cricut BrightPad Go for weeding! Read a complete review of the Cricut BrightPad here!
Apply transfer tape to the vinyl
If your design only has one layer, you can apply transfer tape to the vinyl and apply like normal to the ornament (following the curved surface tips below).
If your design has multiple layers or colors**, you can layer everything beforehand (I did this for the Santa cam, gingerbread, and Grinch ornaments). To do that, find your largest piece of vinyl and cut a piece of transfer tape a little larger than that. Starting with the top layer (whatever piece of vinyl will be on top in your design), stick the transfer tape over it and burnish well with your scraper. Remove the backer. Now, press the transfer tape and first vinyl layer to the next layer. Burnish well and remove the backer. Continue until all your pieces are “stacked” on the single sheet of transfer paper.
**If your design isn’t actually layered but has different colors, you’re welcome to apply each piece directly to the ornament if you prefer (I did this for the snowman and name ornaments.) This is sometimes easier, especially on a curved surface like these ornaments. Just apply a sheet of transfer tape to the individual pieces (I still kept like colors grouped on one sheet of transfer tape, though).
Apply vinyl decal to ornament
First, wipe the surface of your ornament with an alcohol wipe to clean it and remove any oils that might interfere with a good vinyl transfer.
I think it’s easier to apply vinyl to disc ornaments since they’re flatter, which is why I reserved my largest designs for those. But any curved surface is tricky, so, either way, you’ll have to apply the vinyl carefully to avoid wrinkles.
The best trick for applying vinyl to curved surfaces is to cut slits in your transfer tape before sticking the vinyl down. Wherever you can cut a slit from the outside in, do so. This will give you so much more freedom to manipulate your design to fit the curved surface.
Position your decal over the ornament and press down in only the center first. Next, press one element or letter at a time, starting from the center of the decal and moving to the edge. It helps to kind of stretch the transfer tape outward before pressing the vinyl down, making sure you won’t get wrinkles.
Continue pressing from the center to the outside. Burnish well with your fingers (I’d skip the scraper for this part). Remove the transfer tape slowly (and make sure you get all the little pieces since your slits will cause the transfer tape to tear a lot).
If you find your vinyl pieces are wrinkling, you can lightly press everything down, just enough so you can remove the transfer tape. Then, carefully lift up any wrinkled pieces with tweezers or your fingers and reposition to lay flat. Once everything is smooth, press down well with your fingers (you can use an empty backing sheet to assist you in pressing everything smooth–see my gingerbread process pic below).
Even though my Let It Snow image was only one layer, it still wrinkled in multiple places because the image is so large overall and almost a full circular shape. After removing the transfer tape, I was able to lift and stretch the individual letters with tweezers (or my fingers) so they went flat. And you’d never know in the final ornament!
I had similar wrinkling issues with both the Grinch’s smile and the center circle on the Santa cam ornament. So, same thing, I carefully peeled up the wrinkled parts and stretched the vinyl with my fingers while pressing it flat.
The gingerbread girl ornament might be one that would’ve actually been easier to apply in individual pieces directly on the ornament (I know, and right after I just taught you how to layer vinyl, haha). I had multiple pieces on this ornament that wrinkled, so there was a lot that I adjusted after removing the transfer tape. Just press lightly initially and it’ll be easy to peel the pieces up to fix them.
Ideally, you shouldn’t touch the adhesive side of the vinyl, but certain designs are going to be difficult to stretch until you remove the transfer tape. If you’re concerned about that, you can always make your designs smaller or less “round.” Designs that branch out left and right or up and down (with space in between) will lay more easily than a solid circular piece of vinyl.
P.S. If you get any air bubbles under your vinyl while applying it, I find the bubbles usually settle on their own in a day or two!
Add a bow or extra decor
You can add any additional decorations that you want to the outside of the ornament with hot glue. I thought about adding a bow around the neck of the ornament on some of these, but ended up forgetting. They’re already so cute as is!
These seriously are the most fun DIY Christmas ornaments! You have endless options for how to decorate them, but I hope this gives you some good ideas!
DIY glitter ornaments
I love how these easy glitter ornaments turned out! They lend the perfect amount of extra sparkle to your holiday decorations. They also make great gifts for friends or family members, especially since you can customize the vinyl decals to be anything you want!
Happy crafting!
Don’t forget to pin and save for later!
