How To Make DIY Christmas Ornaments With Travel Decals

Who says you can make Christmas ornaments all year?

On three road trips we took this year, I didn’t like the Christmas ornaments they had available at the tourist spots we visited.   

Either they were not my style, or even worse, not my style and way too expensive for me to consider them anyway.  No offense, but I can be a bit of a Christmas ornament snob after working 8 seasons in a Christmas store.  Just saying…

What I did like, though, were the selections available for travel decals.   This project was imagined while searching for a meaningful way to remember our trips by attempting to make a DIY Christmas ornament with travel decals.

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This post is part of the monthly Creative Craft Blog Hop, where I cohost each month with Sara of Birdz Of A Feather blog. 

At the end of this post I share links to the talented bloggers participating in the blog hop this month. 

 

 

 

We always purchase Christmas Ornaments for Travel Souvenirs.

I haven’t traveled the world, but that hasn’t stopped me from purchasing a special ornament as a souvenir from our family travels for the past 30+ years of marriage.

We started collecting Christmas ornaments from our travels before we had kids. Most of the time, the places we travel to are apparent just by looking at the ornament. Hello, Mickey ears, anyone?

Other ornaments are not as obvious to anyone else, but we know precisely which trip the ornament represents and when.

It is a tradition in which the whole family is involved and an excellent way to preserve beautiful memories. 

Christmas ornaments from destinations and travels can often be expensive, or worse, the selection can be disappointing. This is why I came up with the idea to make Christmas ornaments with travel decals.  I realized the available decals can often be what you are looking for to remember the trip more than the available ornaments do. 

 

 

 

 

A little side story here…

I must be honest here and admit that I have this aversion to putting decals or stickers on my car.  If I even consider it, I hear my dad’s voice so clearly saying things like, “You don’t ruin a good car with bumper stickers; it diminishes the resale value!”. 

In college, I found a way to adhere the required parking sticker to a magnet (a friend suggested this) so that the school’s parking sticker didn’t “ruin” my bumper.  And it made my dad much happier too.  This is a lesson he probably learned from my grandfather as well. 

Call it old school, but my dad taught us four girls certain things that have stayed with us. One lesson was the rule that you should not put stickers on your car.

Some lessons are hard to forget, even though most decals are removable these days. 

 

 

 

 

Back to the travel decor Christmas ornaments.

I didn’t like the travel memento Christmas ornaments available on three of the trips we took last year, so I purchased car decals instead to make DIY ornaments representing those trips.

However, I didn’t have time to make them before Christmas.  Nor did I make any other themed ornaments I intended to make. 

When boxing up the Christmas decorations, the supplies purchased for the planned ornaments were omitted because I have realized that if I want to display the ornaments for this year’s Christmas trees, I will have to work on them all year. 

Don’t be surprised to see posts featuring more DIY ornament projects all year. 

 

 

My first DIY ornament idea involved purchasing a clear plastic ornament from Dollar Tree, filling it with acrylic paint for color, and attaching the travel decal to the outside. However, that idea didn’t work out well the first time or the second.

There were too many bubbles underneath the vinyl decal, even after trying the suggested techniques found on YouTube. 

Thankfully, I practiced using local Smoky Mountain car decals instead of sacrificing the only ones I had from our trips. 

 

 

 

If my DIY travel decal ornament idea was going to work, I had to find a different way to creatively use them for Christmas ornaments.

After the first failure, I devised a solution: unfinished wood ornaments, which turned out much better. Most craft stores sell all the supplies I used, including the vintage-style glass glitter.

 

 

 

 

Creating three travel decal ornaments with three different styles.

Each wood ornament was first coated in white acrylic paint as a base coat. Then, each ornament was uniquely decorated in a different style to showcase each travel decal. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For the travel ornament for my husband and son’s hike on the Ozark Trail, I traced a cutout from a U.S. Atlas showing the area they hiked on the map. After attaching the cutout to the wood ornament with ModPodge for paper, I added vintage-style glass glitter around the outside edge for that extra Christmas sparkle. Next, I added the travel decal to the ornament and crafted an ornament hanger with wood beads and a piece of twine.

 

 

 

For our visit to the Angel Oak Tree in Charleston, SC, I painted the selected wood ornament in a deep shade of forest green acrylic paint. Tiny decorative pearl beads were glued to the outside edge of the ornament with hot glue.  Finally, the travel decal was adhered to the front of the ornament, and a decorative hanger was made out of silver twine and faux pearl beads.

 

 

 

 

On the last trip we took to Missouri to visit our son and his family, we detoured for a small side adventure by stopping in Metropolis, Illinois, the home of the world’s largest Superman statue.  I wanted this ornament to stand out in size and color because it was a much larger travel decal.

 

 

 

For a deep-colored background, I covered the front of the oval wood piece with bright blue vinyl. Then, using ModPodge, I covered the edges of the ornament with red vintage-style glass glitter. Last, I created a hanger for this ornament using decorative beads in red and blue.  It is a large-sized ornament for a small town with a larger-than-life attraction. 

 

 

 

 

Pin For Later

 

 

 

Of course, I don’t have a Christmas tree up during this time of the year to display these new travel memory ornaments. 

But for this year’s holiday season, they will be on display along with many year’s worth of ornaments from our travels and special family moments.   

Using travel decals as part of these DIY ornaments was a great way to preserve special moments for all family members in a unique way without the extra cost of ornament you don’t like. 

 

 I would like to invite you to visit the other bloggers participating in the Creative Craft Blog Hop this month.

 

 

 

Hugs,

Isaiah 26:4 “Trust in the Lord forever, For in God the Lord, we have an everlasting Rock”