There’s just something about the coziness of wintertime that gets me crafty. This year, I’m finding that nothing fills my cup more than finding a new craft that I can cozy up by the Christmas tree to work on. Most of the time, this comes in the form of crochet for me, but recently I’ve been enjoying painting. Last year, we announced our pregnancy at Christmas by gifting family photos revealing an ultrasound on wood slice ornaments. This year, when I started decorating for Christmas I realized I had a handful of these blank wood slice ornaments left over, and thought I could paint them to sell in the Etsy shop.

I was never super into painting until this fall when I painted a reversible porch sign, and man, something about it is so therapeutic. I enjoyed my me-time getting out my paints to just focus on creating. Once the idea to handpaint ornaments occurred to me, I got busy looking for inspiration on Pinterest. If you’re interested in creating painted ornaments of your own for an inexpensive gift idea, you can find woodslices here. After finding ideas, I painted the ornament backgrounds black and let them dry. I’m not great at painting free-hand , so I rough-sketched the image onto the black background in pencil first. After this, it was time to get my paints ready. I took a layered approach and painted background to foreground, and chose Santa for three of my ornaments and snowmen for the remaining three. Using acrylic paints, I painted moon-shaped Santa faces onto each side of three ornaments and a snowman looking upward at snow falling on each side of the remaining three. I can’t get over how sweet these turned out! If you’re not interested in painting your own, you can find mine in the etsy shop, here. Are you into making or saving time and buying?