Painted Gingerbread Ornaments

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I have made some crocheted iced gingerbread ornaments, and some Cricut felt and iron on gingerbread ornaments so I figured it was time to make some painted wooden gingerbread ornaments. 

I have seen people use puff paint as the icing on felt or wood gingerbread ornaments and I thought that it worked really well so I decided that is what I wanted to do. I found some wooden ornaments in different shapes at Michaels. They didn't have a huge selection of shapes available, most of the ones I really wanted were sold out. But I picked a few different ones I thought would work well. Really you could use any shape for this project. I thought gingerbread girls and boys, trees, snowflakes, stars, and trees would all be cute. They didn't have most of those, but I ended up with a gingerbread girl, a present, a bow, and an ornament. 

I picked a kind of light brown color of paint that I thought would be a good base color for my gingerbread and painted all of the ornaments in that color. I did a couple of layers of paint and they looked just like little baked gingerbread cookies. 

Then I used the white puffy paint to decorate the brown "cookie". I just made little lines, dots, swirls, and outlines to make them all look like little decorated gingerbread cookies. My icing is far from perfect, keeping the lines straight and even was not the easiest. I feel like my lines all ended up kind of shaky and thick in some parts and thin in others, but once they were all done I think they turned out really fun. 

I think one of the fun things about this projects is that you can take any cutout shape and turn it into an ornament that looks like a little decorated gingerbread cookie. It doesn't have to only be gingerbread boys and girls, or houses. Once you paint any shape brown and decorate it with white lines it automatically looks like gingerbread. If you want a little more ease and control over your lines you could use a white paint pen instead, you just won't get the puffy raised lines. But either way it is a quick and fun little Christmas project.  

How to Make Painted Gingerbread Ornaments

You will need:

• Wooden Christmas shaped cutouts (I got a variety of ornaments from Michaels)
• Brown paint (I used Craftsmart Matte Acrylic in Golden Brown)
• White puffy paint (I used Tulip brand in shiny white)
• Paintbrush

Instructions:

Paint the ornaments in brown and let dry.

Once the paint is dry use the puff paint to draw designs on the ornaments. You can use outlines, lines, swirls, and dots to create the designs. Let dry, the puffy paint took quite a while to dry so be prepared to give them plenty of drying time. 

The ornaments I used already had ribbons attached for hanging, if your shapes did not you can attach a hanger to finish, otherwise once your ornaments are dry you are ready to hang them on your tree.