Since it seems like every store I visit has decided it’s Christmas in November, I’m jumping on the bandwagon and getting in the early holiday spirit by sharing some of the projects I did last year to decorate our Christmas tree.

I found a couple of red wooden bead garlands and a roll of 6″ wide burlap at Michaels to wrap around the tree, and then got a small piece of burlap at the fabric store to cover the tree stand. The tree topper is an origami star created with 12″ square card stock. Here are all the details on the DIY ornaments:

Origami Ornaments (Carambola Flowers)

• Square paper (I used 12″ square card stock)
• Scissors

The first step to make this origami flower is actually to cut your square piece of paper into a pentagon, which is where the scissors come in, and then fold from there. The folding instructions are in German, but there is also a video in English here, which came in handy as some images in the diagram were tough to interpret. Once I got the hang of how to fold these, they were pretty easy to make, but I’d recommend practicing with a sheet of printer paper the first time around. The card stock made for nice crisp folds in the final ornament, but it wasn’t very forgiving to mistakes. To hang them on the tree, I just created a small hole to push the ornament hanger through.

Click here to view the folding instructions for the Carambola Flower

Layered Paper Ornaments

• Paper
• Styrofoam Balls
• Circular Paper Punch
• Hot Glue Gun
• Paper Clips

These ornaments were far more time consuming to make, but I really liked how they turned out. I used red cardstock on half of them, shown above, and pages from the New York Times Sunday magazine for the other half, shown below. After I’d punched out all the circles, I glued them in rows on the Styrofoam balls, kind of like shingles, starting from the top and tucking each row in under the one above it. The glue gun worked great for the card stock, but if you use a thinner paper like the magazine pages, be careful pressing down the circles because you’ll be able to feel the heat of of the glue through the paper. Once I had finished with the bottom row, I added one circle to the very top, then clipped a paper clip into an upside-down U shape and pushed it through the paper circle into the Styrofoam ball to create a loop for the ornament hanger.