Sunday 22 December 2013

Peg Christmas Ornament Tutorial

 
 
I made this pretty Christmas ornament after seeing something similar hanging on display at a local craft store earlier this week. I didn't have my phone/camera with me that day so I tried to recreate what I saw, from memory. The reason I liked this ornament so much was that it was cute (always good) and also because we just happen to have over 200 wooden pegs sitting in a draw in my sons room. Why so many pegs you ask. Well Ben, my 10 year old, wanted to make something he saw on the internet and needed a few pegs. Dad took him shopping for pegs and thought buying 200 would work out a lot cheaper than buying a smaller packet and surely Ben would find a use for them. Well he didn't but I sure did.
It takes 26 pegs to make this ornament - well the way I made it anyway. I have seen similar peg ornaments on Pinterest but they are made using much fewer pegs and they are a lot more sparse. Turns out that the ornament I spied at the craft shop was the sparse type but to be honest I prefer mine - it's much more festive. Because I was going from what I remembered I figured this was the way to do it but in actual fact you are meant to glue the pegs at the rounded/fat end using far fewer.
In addition to using a whole lot more pegs I also decided that this ornament needed sparkle. I bought myself a heat gun and a whole lot of embossing powder sometime last year and I love to emboss things. So using silver glitter I embossed the whole thing. Of course if you don't have that available to you then a plain wooden ornament would be fine or you could paint the edges any colours you like. Gold or silver is nice but then you could do alternating colours of green and red or candy cane colours. The sky is the limit I guess.
Now this ornament is pretty big so it can be used in place of a wreath on the front door or added to the centre of the wreath. It can also be used to hang on the tree as a central focus.
 
 

Here's how to get started. Simply take your peg in your hands and twist the two sides in opposite directions and the metal clasp/spring will simply pop off. You can throw this away.
 
If you are going to emboss like I did or paint then now is the time to do it. I have
to say that after heat embossing 26 pegs my fingers were getting pretty warm so
you might like to alternate between embossing a few and gluing for a few.
 
 
 
I glued the two pieces of the peg like this. OK, to be truthful I got Ben to do it
for me and he loved being helpful and part of my crafting.
 

Once you have a few or all 26 pairs glued together it's time to glue them to
one another to form a circle.
 
Because I did this tutorial after I actually completed the ornament I am using
the left over pegs (the ones that weren't well embossed) to show how it's done.
 
 
Here is the back view. I found the circle to be fairly solid but just to keep
things extra well stuck together I did hot glue a circle of cardstock to the back.
 
 
 
Once all the pegs were glued together I made a banner from white cardstock, heat embossed in silver, and then hot glued that to the front.