Modern DIY Ornament Holders

*This post is part of the Modern Handmade Home series and sponsored by Home Hardware- find all my policies here.* 

Today I’m excited to be sharing another Modern Handmade Home DIY with you all! This month, we’ve partnered with Home Hardware to share holiday themed ideas and I love the ideas that came out of this challenge! You can see them all at the bottom of this post. Mine is actually a request from my mom…. I made this DIY Ornament Holder! I am so happy with how it turned out although I have to say… angled cuts aren’t my strength. This girl isn’t very good at angles so I needed some help on that one. Whoever said you’ll never need SOH CAH TOA after high school… well, I guess I did ;)

So my mom actually requested I make her four of these last year and while it took me almost a full year… I’m happy to be making good on that promise. Every year she gets ornaments with photos of each of the kids and she wanted to have a tree for each of the kids to have their photo ornaments in. I styled them here with some pretty baubles from Home Hardware but they’ll be put up in her house with all those cute photo ornaments of my kids in them.

Ready for the tutorial?

To make your own Modern DIY Ornament Holders, you’ll need:

• 1×2 – I used a fir instead of SPF so I could leave it natural with no finger joints
• 1/4″ MDF sheets (I used this for affordability and a smoother finish than plywood)
• Oil based primer (for MDF)
• Beautiful green paint- mine is Gedney Green (CC065-3) in Matte from BeautiTone
• The tiniest little eye hooks you can find
• Thread & Scissors
• Pliers
• Nails & Hammer (or nail gun)
• Large square
• Skill saw
• Miter Saw (or hand saw with patience ;))
• Angle finder or SOH CAH TOA brilliance

Alright so the instructions on this one are pretty simple but the angles is what’ll get ya. Start by choosing your size. Since these needed to fit on a specific wall at my mom’s house- we made ours 18″ wide. Then I wanted to get the frame out of one 10 foot 1×2, so we maxed our height at 27 inches (33 before cuts for each of the sides). To draw your triangle, draw the bottom first, then draw a line to the top of the tree using your square. Then just connect the dots using a straight edge.

We cut the triangles out using a skill saw and then gave them a coat of oil based primer. Don’t skip the primer! MDF will bubble if you don’t seal it with an oil based primer before painting with latex paint. After the primer dried, I did two coats of matte paint. The colour is totally dreamy, you guys. It looks so beautiful with the wood frame- and perfect for Christmas!

I actually LOVE BeautiTone paint. Our whole last home was painted with it. Inside and out, and we’ve always found the quality to be great and the paint desk to be even more helpful. Like… we were on a first name basis and I love that.

Okay SO next is the tricky part. So tricky that I didn’t take any photos… because I had to wait for Shane to get home to help me with the math! Cutting the angles of the frame pieces. This fir 1×2 is so beautiful and I didn’t want to mess it up (I’m a bit more casual about my cuts when I’m using SPF!) so I tested my cuts on scrap baseboard that I’d had. From what I understand (Shane is the angle guy… and so is Love Create Celebrate’s husband who I may have called and asked for math help :P) You take the angle of the corner and divide it in two… then subtract that from 90 to find your cut angle. The challenge for us is that one of those numbers was 55 BUT our miter saw only goes to 45 so we needed to do a little bit of precision freehand cutting.

5/10. Do not recommend free handing cuts.

But it still turned out beautifully, somehow! Ha! I did not seal the fir but you could use a matte poly if you like to add some protection.

Now it’s time to assemble! You need a second set of hands for this- just to hold everything in place while you tack it together. assemble it by hand and then use a nail to tack the frame together. I did just one nail in each corner to hold it enough so that when I flipped it over and nailed it together through the backing it didn’t shift and separate in the corners. This is when it starts looking ah-mazing and you’ll be impatient to do the next step!

Eye hooks! Screw these tiny guys in by using pliers. You can try using your fingers but you’ll probably find by the third one your fingers hurt and you’re frustrated. Not that I did that… Then you can string your string through the eye hooks and you’re DONE! Stand back and admire your creation!

I’m really happy with how these turned out- now I need to finish the other three and get them over to my mom! I know that they will be such great fixtures in her Christmas decor to display the photo ornaments of her grand babies… and if you ask me, they’re darn cute pictures ;) The ornaments that I used for these photos are these shatterproof ones (in Rose Gold and Dark Raspberry) from Home Hardware.

Ready to see what all the other ladies made over?! They rocked this challenge so much… it makes me want to decorate my entire house for Christmas like, yesterday.