Christmas Crafts ~ Beautiful Decorative Gilded Paper Balls

The following is a guest post from my bloggy buddy, Rachel. She blogs at Architecture of a Mom. I’m delighted to have her here today to give you a beautiful Christmas craft perfect for your Christmas decorating ideas. Please enjoy and visit her fantastic blog and give her some love and thanks for guest posting for me.

Hi everyone! My name is Rachel and you can normally find me at Architecture of a Mom. I blog when I’m not going crazy working my full time job as an architect or my other full time as a mom to 3 girls–a six year old and twin two year olds. K.C. asked me if I would help out with posts this week, and of course I said yes!

I love simple geometric shapes when I’m decorating, and I’ve found that decorating for Christmas, if you add a little bit of metallic for some sparkle, it’s perfect! These little decorative “gilded” paper balls are perfect sitting on a mantel, in a clear vase, or in a bowl as part of a vignette!

All you need is some stiff paper (I used cardstock from my scrapbooking stash), some glue (I used a plain old glue stick), and some gold craft paint and a brush to apply it.

I was inspired to create these paper accent balls by a post from Unoriginal Mom in a monthly silhouette challenge. She upcycled old Christmas cards to make her ornaments, but I thought that solid colored red and green balls would look great in a holiday vignette. She has a free file to use to cut out the circles using  a Silhouette Portrait or Cameo. But really, you can create this using a circle punch and something to score the circle.

You want to cut out twenty circles for each ball.

Each circle must be scored with an equilateral triangle.

You glue together two sets of 5 for the top and bottom. Glue the remainder of the circles together in a strip so the triangles alternate between pointing up and down, and then join the strip to make a loop which is the middle of the ball.

Glue the top and bottom pieces to the middle.

These are pretty cool geometric pieces of art on their own, but I wanted to kick them up a notch or two…so I added a metallic touch. Basically, I took some gold craft paint and painted all the exposed edges gold.

It almost looks like I gilded the edges. I’m loving the architectural look of these accent pieces!

I’m really loving the gold look this holiday season. If you like it too, you might want to check out my monogrammed snowflake ornaments.

Thanks, K.C. for letting me share this Christmas project with your readers.