Color-Dipped Letter Ornaments + More DIY Christmas Ornaments

Am I the only one who feels like unpacking the Christmas decorations is almost as good as opening presents on Christmas morning? It makes me so excited for all of the joy and magic of the season ahead! Maybe it's a sign that I have to many decorations, but each year I unpack a few decorations that I've completely forgotten about from the year before, and this time around one of those pleasant surprises was the set of color-dipped letter ornaments that I DIY'd for the skinny tree in our living room last season.

Aren't these red and white DIY Christmas ornaments fun?! I shared a few photos of these on our tree last year, but I never showed you just how easy they were to make, so today I wanted to give you the quick and easy tutorial that saved me a bunch of money!

Today I've also joined with some of my blogging friends to bring you a dozen other simple and beautiful DIY Christmas ornament ideas! You'll find links to the tutorials to all of these ornaments and more at the end of this post.

But before you hop around to check out some of the other gorgeous ornaments, let me show you how I made my oversized and graphic, color-dipped letter ornaments.

My alphabet ornaments were inspired by the fun, colorful alphabet ornaments from the Land of Nod. I loved the look, but for our living room I really wanted all red and white letters, rather than the variety of blue, green, yellow, red, and purple available at the Land of Nod. Plus, even at the current sale price of $5.25 each (down from $7), it would have cost me more than $130 for a the full alphabet, and that was more than I could justify for new ornaments.

Instead, I went the DIY route which saved me a ton of money in exchange for a couple hours of my time. I purchased 3 inch wood letters from the craft section at Target for only $.79 each. I also picked up larger wood letters for each of our first initials {A B C and S}.

I started by painting both sides of the wood letters white.

I then used skinny masking tape to tape off the portions that I wanted to paint red on each letter.

Before adding the red paint, I brushed on a thin coat of my favorite craft sealer along the tape line, which created a seal to prevent any paint from bleeding under the tape.

Then I painted a section of each letter red {it took two coats for good coverage because red paint is always thinner}.

After the red paint dried, I removed the tape and revealed super crisp paint lines.

Last year I just propped letters up on the branches of our tree, but they weren't very stable, so this year I'm quickly adding loops of red and white baker's twine using hot glue.

I'll be setting up the tree with these color-block letter ornaments in the next couple of days, but in the menatime, here's how they looked last year paired with black and white striped ribbon and some simple white lights on our skinny living room tree.

And now, here are some more gorgeous DIY Christmas ornament ideas from my talented blogging friends! Head over to see what they have in store for you!