Vintage Gardening Decoupage Heart Ornaments

This is my second year participating in a blogger ornament swap and with this craft, as with any other idea that is shaking around in my brain, turned out different but special in it's own way. I had picked up a vintage organic gardening book from a Little Free Library at our community farm. It's from the 1950's and has seen better day but I most definitely wanted to give it another life. I could have saved it for reference I suppose but I loved the idea of pieces of it being across the ocean, since my ornament partner is from the Isle of Man in England! It's actually super simple to create ornaments like this as long as you have a good base to build on!

I started by finding some of the pages with pretty illustrations or interesting words that jumped off the page. I then set up our watercolor station and while Teddy pained a big brown blob next to me, I painted the pages in different greens and yellows, a touch of blue here and there. I did this over and over until I had 4 or 5 pages of watercolor painted gardenining book pages. I let them dry and came back to the table an hour or so later.

After shredding the pages in different ways, or you could cut them if you like a more regimented look, I started gluing larger pieces onto ceramic hearts that I picked up at a local craft store. You could use any base, even the plastic DIY bulbs you're seeing around this time of year. Be sure to start with larger pieces as these will be the base and what peaks through your hero pieces, the ones that turned out the most pleasing to the eye. As an adhesive, I used a touch of tacky glue then glazed/sealed with modge podge, my go to.

I completed this process a few times with various pieces as well as some that I hadn't painted for a clean print look. What I love about using decopauge is that it's hard to mess it up. If you don't like the way that a piece looks, you can simply cover it with another and smooth it down (within reason). I created four ornaments and shipped them off to England with time to spare, I know I know, which is not usually how I operate! I am planning to make a version of these as gifts this year and can't wait to see what people think! I think that gifting handmade is one of the nicest things you can do in this consumer driven atmosphere, we call the holiday season.

You can find all the amazing ornaments in the swap, in the previous post so check out all the good stuff and leave some love for the ladies involved!

Ornament Swap Partners