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Christmas Decorations with Foil and Nail Polish
A High-End Dollar Store Craft
© Stephie McCarthy
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We made one-of-a-kind ornaments with recycled foil, decorations and nail polish.
Here's our Santa ornament, before and after ...
This gnome figure from a Dollar Store can be decorated as a gnome, or a wizard, elf, and of course ... Santa!
To get the effect of lacquer, we covered parts of the figure in foil and then layered many shades of nail polish
We used three shades of red for the suit. It looks amazingly rich and was easy to do!
Fire-rich reds layered together made an amazing lacquered effect.
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Step One, cover the ornament in foil
To help the foil stick, we primed it with plain white craft paint.
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We used ordinary aluminum foil torn into small, irregular pieces.
Use fresh or recycled foil. Recycled gives a crackle look. We smoothed the crackle with a burnisher before tearing. See the smooth circle on the far right? This was burnished for a minute to press the foil flat.
Straight edges tend to show. Irregular edges will blend.
We used ModPodge painted on the foil and also on the figure.
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Check the price of ModPodge here
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Hold the foil on the figure for a minute or so until it sticks, then burnish it smooth.
Continue to apply foil to the figure overlapping pieces as you go ...
... and burnish smooth. Use a small brush to re-glue pieces that are loose. Eventually they will stick as the glue sets.
Soon you'll have a wonderful silver-suited Santa.
We've found that recycled aluminum pie pans are great for textured accessories.
They are easy to cut with scissors and style with glue to hold in place. We made a simple pleated hat band for our Santa, shown below.
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Step two, paint the foil with nail polish
For a rich finish, we used inexpensive nail enamels. The selection of colors and glitter effects is amazing even with discounted polish.
You'll only need a little. Plus, the built-in brush makes it easy to apply smoothly. Nail polish dries quickly. You can paint a project like this to a rich finish in record time.
If you store it in the fridge, nail polish will stay liquid for years.
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check prices of nail polish here
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To get the deep red, lacquered effect we used magenta (left), then clear coral (right), and a top coat of rose-copper with sparkles (center).
Do lots of tests on scrap foil to see what mixture of colors you like. Polish dries so quickly, you can do three coats of diferent colors in very little time.
We also made striped details with a darker red, top-coated with the rose-copper. Do as many coats as you like. The aluminum foil will shine through.
The boots were made with green followed by a glittery blue.
At this point, we made a great discovery. Nail polish can be dipped into dry glitter to make it super sparkly. We used this technique on Santa's beard, (we call him Glitter Beard). If polish is not glittery enough, add dry glitter as you go.
We used clear coral for blush effects, dabbing it with a finger to blend.
Toothpick swabs were perfect for the smallest details.
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check the price of mini swabs here
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Every Santa -- every ornament -- can be completely unique!
This one has amazing color from discount nail polish!
And we didn't stop here! We found more ornaments that were charming but could use a little polish!
This sleigh ornament was $3.00 at Walmart and will go in a mantel display (in progress).
Wrapping toy blocks in foil was easy to do, and needed no glue.
We added dazzle to the sleigh with foil, glitter, and bits and bobs. The video shows how we made this ornament a work of art.
The polish worked on glitter, dried flowers, wood, and even paper! We explain much more in our video (link below).
Subscribe to our YouTube Channel for our next Christmas project (we think you will love)!
See the foil and polish video here
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and more!
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