Glass Bead Ornaments
These glass bead ornaments are SO PRETTY and so simple to make! Create these beautiful DIY holiday ornaments using a cookie cutter, clear glue, and flat glass gems.
This fun and easy Christmas craft is great for both kids and adults! Hang these beaded glass Christmas ornaments on the Christmas tree or in the window. Then watch how the lights shine through, creating beautiful and colourful reflections.
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DIY Glass Bead Christmas Ornaments
Instructions:
Step 1: Find what you need
- Gather your supplies and materials.
Step 2: Prepare your ornament mold
- We’ll be using a cookie cutter to make our ornament shape. Set the cookie cutter on a tray, or on something else that will protect your working surface from glue.
- Cut a piece of plastic wrap larger enough to fit inside the cookie cutter.
- Push the plastic wrap down into the cookie cutter, making sure the bottom, the corners, and the edges are all flat.
Step 3: Add glue and glass beads to the prepared cookie cutter
- Add a thin layer of clear glue (about 1/8 inch deep) inside the cookie cutter, on top of the plastic wrap.The glue needs to be thick enough to connect the glass beads, but not too thick, or it won’t dry properly.
- Place a glass bead into the glue. We found it best to start along the edge, or in the corners, of the cookie cutter.
- Continue, filling the cookie cutter with glass beads. Use different sizes and colours of beads, to fit as many as possible. Shift the gems around in the glue to make room for more if needed.
- Allow the ornament to dry in the cookie cutter mold. This will take approximately 2 to 4 days.
Step 4: Complete your glass bead ornament
- Once your ornament is dry enough that you can remove it from the mold without losing its shape, you can remove it from the cookie cutter.Scrunch the extra plastic wrap on top of the ornament and pull the cookie cutter up and away from the ornament. It should come off easily if you push down on the ornament gently at the same time.
- Peel the ornament off of the plastic wrap.If the back of your ornament isn’t completely dry, you can set it down, wet side up, and allow it to dry for another day or two.
- Trim off any messy glue bits around the outside of the ornament.
- Poke a hole through the glue with a needle, near the top of the ornament.
- Cut a 6 inch piece of metallic cord and string it through the hole in the ornament. Tie the ends into a knot to make an ornament hanger.
- Your glass bead Christmas ornament is complete!
Helpful Tips:
- Test your bead placement in the cookie cutter before adding the glue so you know how many glass beads you can fit and what colours look best.
- Remove extra glue from the front of the ornament by adding rubbing alcohol to a q-tip or cotton ball and rubbing the glue gently. Don’t do this to the back of the ornament since you need the glue to hold it together.
- Use different sizes (and colours) of glass beads to fit the most beads into the cookie cutter.
What type of beads are used to make these ornaments?
The “beads” used to make these Christmas ornaments are not typical beads with a hole in the middle. These glass beads are also called “flat glass marbles” or “flat glass gems”. You can use them as decoration in vases or candleholders, but they’re also great for crafting!
If you don’t have glass beads you can use any other type of flat, smooth glass (like sea glass) to make these ornaments. You can also use regular plastic beads (or regular glass beads, with a hole in the middle). Clear or translucent beads are better since the Christmas lights shine so nicely through them.
You can find glass beads at the dollar store, on Amazon, and at craft stores like Michaels.
What size cookie cutters are used to make glass bead ornaments?
Larger cookie cutters (3.5 inches to 5 inches across) work best for these ornaments. But it will really depend on the shape and the size of your gems. We used 3 inch cookie cutters to make our star and ornament ball glass bead ornaments. It was a bit tight, but it still worked.
Our Christmas tree cookie cutter was 3-1/2 inches tall. This is a nice size that allows you to fit in a good amount of beads and create a recognizable shape, without making the ornament too heavy.
How many glass beads do I need per ornament?
The exact number of beads needed will depend on the size of your beads and the size and shape of your cookie cutter. But here’s the amount of beads we used per ornament, to give you a general idea of how many you might need:
- Christmas Tree: 11 beads
- Star: 11 beads
- Ball ornament: 15 beads
Can I use tin foil instead of plastic wrap?
We found that plastic wrap worked much better than tin foil for this project. We used tin foil to make a mold for our glass bead heart suncatcher and it worked well for that project.
But for this project, we weren’t able to get the foil smooth and flat around the shapes of the cookie cutters. So instead of coming off the foil nicely, the glue got stuck in all the little creases so it was really hard to peel them off. And they just looked messy in the end.
Use dollar store supplies to create these beautiful glass bead Christmas ornaments. Hang them in the Christmas tree, or place them in the window as a Christmas suncatcher!
Here’s even more DIY Christmas ornament ideas:
Our book Low-Mess Crafts for Kids is loaded with 72 fun and simple craft ideas for kids! The projects are fun, easy and most importantly low-mess, so the clean up is simple!
