How to Make Wrapped Yarn Ornaments
Every time I go to the store lately, I find myself wandering down the Christmas aisles admiring all the pretty things I don’t need. Especially the festive little cookie cutters.
I have these beautiful visions of the wonderful cookies I could make for my kids… you know… if there weren’t four baskets of laundry downstairs that need to be folded, dishes that need to be done before I can even think about making dinner and three little people who are constantly hugging one (or both?) of my legs while I try to get anything done.
But I can’t help myself. I usually end up throwing one or two cute little cookie cutters into my shopping cart. Then I push my shopping cart down the aisle with a little smirk on my face, fantasizing about all the amazing cookies I’m going to bake.
Except I never do. I bake cookie cutter cookies maybe once a year at Christmas time. MAYBE. And yet somehow I’ve ended up with a pretty impressive collection of cute little cookie cutters.
But do you know what else you can use cookie cutters for?
Crafts!
Yup. All those awesome shapes are just PERFECT for crafts! And since I seem to prioritize crafting far above baking, I feel like I can justify buying them. (And that’s what I’ll keep telling myself.) There are TONS of fun crafts you can make using cookie cutters.
Some of the most popular holiday posts on One Little Project use cookie cutters. Besides the awesome wrapped yarn ornaments below, check out our melted bead ornaments, birdseed ornaments, and melted peppermint ornaments – they’ve all been crazy popular on Pinterest and they ALL use cookie cutters.
Check out our video for how to make Wrapped Yarn Ornaments:
If you’re looking for more fun Christmas ornaments to make, check out our tutorials for:
How to Make Wrapped Yarn Ornaments
These wrapped yarn ornaments were inspired by One Jive. The following is a list of affiliate links to Amazon products that are similar to the materials I used. Here’s what you’ll need to make them:
- Cookie cutters (of course!)
- Cotton yarn
- White glue
- Styrofoam trays
- Sewing pins
- Printable Star Template and Christmas Tree Template (optional)
Try to choose cookie cutter shapes that aren’t too complicated. Stars, hearts, Christmas trees and even gingerbread men will work really well. But you might want to avoid complicated snowflake or reindeer shapes. It’s not that they won’t work, they’re just more work to make.
I used styrofoam trays from the produce section at my grocery store. I believe I bought tomatoes on these? Just make sure you wash them well and let them dry.
I used cotton yarn from the dollar store. (It’s even made in Canada! Woo!). I’m pretty sure you can use regular yarn too? I’ve just never actually tried it, so I can’t comment on how they turn out.
Place the cookie cutters on top of a styrofoam tray, then trace around the edges, preferably with a mechanical pencil.
You’ll be “scratching” the styrofoam more than actually drawing the shape and the lead in a mechanical pencil is thin and sharp enough to make a good indent.
Poke sewing pins through the styrofoam to mark out your shape.
NOTE: Don’t use your good sewing pins for this craft. They’ll be covered in dried glue when you’re done, which really doesn’t come off. Check the dollar store for inexpensive sewing pins that you won’t feel bad about throwing away.
I used about 20 sewing pins to mark out each of my shapes. Make sure you space out the pins so that they are no less than 1/4″ and no more than 1″ apart. Somewhere around 1/2″ spacing is perfect.
Cut out your yarn into manageable lengths (Trust me, you don’t want to work with a 6ft long piece of glue covered yarn!). I made yarn pieces about 2 ft long and used 3 or 4 pieces of yarn per shape. So that’s about 6 ft to 8 ft of yarn per shape.
Make sure you cut your yarn before you get started. Your hands are going to get messy with glue really quickly!
Pour some white glue to a small bowl. I started with an entire small bottle (2 fl oz) of dollar store glue. If you start to run out of glue, you can always add more as you need it.
Put one of the pieces of yarn into the bowl of glue and use a plastic fork to stir it around in the glue until it’s completely covered.
Slide the yarn through the middle prongs of the fork, then pull it up and through to remove the excess glue.
Wrap the glue soaked yarn around the outline of the shape.
Then start to wrap the yarn around the pins, from one side of the shape to the other, sort of randomly. Try to wrap the yarn around all of the pins at least once if you can.
When you reach the end of your first piece of yarn, add another piece of yarn to the bowl of glue and continue wrapping randomly across the shape around the pins.
When you’re happy with the amount of yarn within your shape, try to tuck the end of the yarn somewhere inconspicuous. Then use your finger nail to push the yarn down on each of the pins. You want to make sure all the layers of yarn are touching each other so they stick together well when they dry.
You can even push down the yarn in the middle of the shape. The more the yarn pieces are touching, the stronger your ornament will be.
Then repeat the whole process with another yarn colour and another shape.
Allow the yarn ornaments to dry overnight.
When the yarn is completely dry and stiff to the touch, you can start removing the pins.
The pins are going to be glued to the yarn, so you have to loosen the grip before they’ll come out. Try twisting the pins or even pushing them down through the styrofoam. Once the grip of the glue breaks, make sure you use your fingernail to hold the yarn down as you pull out each of the pins.
Once all of the pins have been removed, use a flat knife to loosen the ornaments from the styrofoam.
Even just with dollar store glue, the yarn was completely stiff and they held their shapes really well!
Tie on some ribbon or string to turn them into Christmas ornaments.
Aren’t they pretty!? I love the bright colours and how each shape is so unique!
It’s hard to be patient while you wait for these to dry, but it’s so worth the wait!
These wrapped yarn ornaments are SO PRETTY and they’re so fun to make! Using yarn, glue, sewing pins and styrofoam trays you can make unique and beautiful homemade Christmas ornaments! They look beautiful on the Christmas tree and they make amazing gifts.
Best of all, you can use these ornaments as an excuse to buy more cookie cutters for your collection!
If you’re looking for more fun cookie cutter ornament ideas, check out our melted bead ornaments. These are so fun to make and they look so pretty on the tree!
Don’t forget to check out our new book Low-Mess Crafts for Kids for 72 fun and simple craft ideas for kids! It’s loaded with tons of super fun kids craft ideas!
Where to buy:
You can purchase Low-Mess Crafts for Kids from Amazon, or wherever books are sold:
Amazon | Barnes and Noble | Books- A- Million | Indiebound | Indigo | Amazon Canada
