Day 14 of the 24 Days of Christmas Crafting!
The goal for these 24 days is to give you ideas for hand-crafted Christmas decorations for your tree and home. Come back each day to try the next craft. 24 Days of Christmas Crafting!
This poinsettia Christmas ball can be made in whatever size suits you and your holiday decorating needs. I made mine from a four-inch foam ball and the finished product is over five inches. It now hangs above my computer for the remainder of the holiday season.
Materials and Supplies
- Red and Green Card Stock
- Pattern from my Resource Library
- Styrofoam Ball
- Yellow-Head Straight Pins
- Flat-Head Straight Pins
- Ribbon
For my specific project, I used a 4-inch Styrofoam ball. To get the coverage you see in the pictures, I needed 32 flowers, which required two sheets of each color of card stock. You can use a smaller ball, make smaller flowers, etc. It’s up to you.
About the Pattern
Cutting by Hand: If you do not have a craft machine, you can cut these by hand from the pattern in my Resource Library. I recommend you copy the outline for the inner portion (the one with six leaves) from the PDF into some other application, repeatedly paste it onto the page, then print it onto your red card stock. Repeat for the outer portion (the one with three leaves) onto green card stock. Printing to the card stock will save you the time of hand drawing them.
Craft Machine Cutting: For those with craft machines, the .SVG file in my Resource Library contains one of the red leaves and one of the green leaves. Bring that file into your design software and scale the size of the red and green poinsettia leaves if you need them larger or smaller. Tell your craft machine how many of each color you want, the size of your paper, and the paper type. It will do the work for you to determine how many sheets of paper you will need.
Assembly
The first thing I did was to put two strips of ribbon around the ball at 90 degrees to each other. I found a dark green velvet ribbon to use for this. The contrast in texture from the velvet to the card stock is beautiful! To attach the ribbon to the ball, use flat-head straight pins at the top and bottom of the ball. You only need a single pin at the bottom where the two pieces of ribbon overlap. At the top, it’s best to use a couple of pins on each ribbon to keep them from shifting.
Lay out all your cut red and green poinsettia leaves. You can use these flat but the finished product is more interesting if you curl the leaves first. There are tools you can buy to help with curling paper. For these poinsettia leaves, I used my fingernails in a scratching type of motion to encourage a curl into the leaves. Do this for all the red and green leaf clusters.
The yellow pins represent the yellow flower portion of a poinsettia and the red and green card stock shapes represent the red and green leaves of the poinsettia plant.
Using a yellow-headed straight pin, push the pin through the center of a red leaf cluster then through the center of a green leaf cluster.
Now push the pin into the ball near the top corner of a section of the foam ball left uncovered by ribbon. Insert the pin about a third to a half an inch away from the ribbon. It doesn’t need to be inserted right next to the ribbon unless you made smaller flowers.
On each of the four sections of the foam ball that are not covered by ribbon, I used eight flowers. There is one in the top corner, one in the bottom corner, then three rows of two.
After you have all the flowers inserted into the ball, you can rotate the green and red poinsettia leaves to cover the exposed foam that peeks through. You can also pull out a flower and reposition it if needed.
The last thing to do is add a ribbon and a decorative string for hanging to the top of the poinsettia ball. To attach the ribbon to the ball, I used a long flat-headed straight pin. The gold strand I used for hanging is threaded through the back of the ribbon.
Come back each day for a new project in the 24 Days of Christmas Crafting!
You can get the pattern to this and all my DIY and craft projects in my Resource Library by filling out this form.
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