Pompom Photo Ornaments

So I had a pretty great summer. It was an action packed good ol’ time. Rob, my mom and I traveled up and grabbed my nephews and took them on a Texas Tour. They saw West Texas, San Antonio, the Rio Grande Valley and Houston before they were driven back home again. To commemorate the occasion Rob bought the boys a little Instax Mini instant camera  and I hit up the craft store with them to grab sketchbooks and washi tape and markers and all sorts.

With these things the boys were able to document their favorite things about the trip. This most often meant me hopping out of the car with them so we could take pic to coincide with whatever story was developing on the pages of their books. We stopped at state lines, posed in front of swimming pools with goggles on and, within about an hour of our several weeks log trip, we even stood outside of an abandoned building that said “Conner” so a kid with the same name could try out his newly discovered signature pose he developed as we crossed the state line.

We were snapping pics with the little camera and also with my iPhone so much that I decided to start a little private Instagram account just to document the  journey. This way their mom could also keep up with what we were up to real time. She could see when we were eating something sugary and shouldn’t be or if we were getting our culture rocked at an art museum.

I have so many of these images that I love that I decided that I wanted to put a few on my Christmas tree. I found the inner part of embroidery hoops left over from who knows what the heck I used the outer hoops for… With those and some pompoms I made some totally kitschy cute ornaments that I’m stoked to trim the tree with. Want to see how to make them?

For this project you will need:

• 3″ round embroidery hoops
• 3″ circle punch
• Printed photographs (I printed 4×4 images from Walmart directly from our vacation Instagram account)
• pompom trim
• Pompoms/pompom trim
• Paint
• Ribbon or string

Print or have your photographs printed to fit within your hoops. These are tiny 3″ hoops and so 4×4 Instagram prints from the Walmart photo website work perfectly well. As an added bonus, you can print directly from IG without having to awkwardly save images and then upload them to their site. Warning… when it’s so easy you might seriously over-order! :)

Paint your hoops a variety of bright, pretty colors if you’d like (this is not totally necessary if you don’t care that the natural wood color might peek out from your pompoms).

Using a pompom trim or scissors, cut out circle shape in the size of your hoops.

Be sure to cut out plenty of pics for all of your hoops. Now unfortunately I managed to lose a whole heck of a lot of my hoops and I have no clue how! As such I only got to make 4 when I had planned on about a dozen but at least the 4 I made are pretty darn cool! :)

Using a glue that will dry clear, like Tacky Glue, adhere your photos onto the hoops.

For a little bit of extra, and totally optional, fun, you can add seed beads inside of the hoops in between the photos for a fun, rattle effect. It’s not going to be noticed much as they hang on the tree, but I did it just because I’ve got tons of beads and I think it’s kind of neat.

Now, remember how I lost a bunch of hoops? The plan was to use the metal fastener/tightener on the outer hoop to hang my ornaments from BUT most of those pieces were lost. As such I had to plan B this business and a length of ribbon glued along the side of the hoop, about the middle, coming up to form a loop at the top of the middle and then glued down along the other side makes a super sturdy and convenient hanger.

Cover up your  outer edges and ribbon hanger as it attaches to it with pompoms or pompom trim. Now in all honesty I found this trim to be a bit hit or miss. I wanted thick, full pompoms around the edges and it worked out really well for the pink and red trims but the green I bought was so thin that it looked totally different than the others and I felt like it didn’t blend in.

I purchased some white, which goes against my use what I have on hand theme for this year and IT was a bit too thin and the poms were sort of wonky with weird things sticking out and some not round at all. But since I had already paid for it, cut it and couldn’t take it back, I left the white though I’m not a huge fan of it.

I think that it would have been better cost-wise to just use regular pompoms and glue them individually to the hoops, in all honesty.

But the fact that I have some of my fave photos from our summer vacation and some kitschy cute pompoms around them makes me very happy.

Even if after everything I only managed to make 4. :)