Homemade snowmen gifts for Elmer’s Holiday #GlueNGlitter

So cute, right?! I love them! I want a whole family of them! I need more sizes and shapes of water bottles! lol. Ryan had a lot of fun making these snowmen, too. We’ve been crazy making crafts this holiday season. Mainly because it keeps us busy with something fun and festive to decorate the house with, but also because I love homemade gifts. Things that Ryan helped make are the best presents for grandparents! And Ryan is super proud of them.

With all this crafting, I need to watch what I’m spending–I can get carried away. A trip to Michaels is a disaster (I’ve learned the hard way, haha). But a trip to Walmart is perfect–they have everything I need and at great prices.

This time I stopped to stock up on Elmer’s CraftBond and X-ACTO products. These items make crafting so much easier. I got some scissors, an X-ACTO knife, a glue pen, spray glue and a bottle of glue. I really wanted the paper cutting board (next time! I had no idea you could get those things for under $20!), rubbed cement (a must-have in every house), and the fun X-ACTO stencils.

Okay, to make your own adorable snowmen for display, these are the items I used:

~empty plastic bottles (use any shape or size and have a variety for a cute snowman family!)
~foam and felt pieces to decorate the snowmen (or you could use construction paper, ribbon, etc.)
~X-ACTO #1 Craft Knife (mine is the Designer Series that’s pink!)
~X-ACTO 8″ Scissors~Elmer’s CraftBond Acid-Free Multi-Purpose Spray Adhesive – OR – Elmer’s CraftBond Paper Craft Glue Gel (or multi-purpose glue)
~Elmer’s CraftBond Flexible Dual Tip Glue Pen

First, I used my X-ACTO knife to cut off the bottom of my water bottles. This makes them prettier (less bottle-like) and allows you to put a battery-powered tea light inside for an awesome effect!


After removing the water bottle label, I prepared my glue. You want paint the entire outside of the bottle in a glue/water mix so you can add white tissue paper. I decided to try 2 different methods…. 1) I mixed the Elmer’s all-purpose glue with some water in a cup and painted it on the bottle with a brush. 2) I used the Elmer’s spray adhesive.

Results: the spray was definitely much faster, but it was very… flat. I like the scrunched up and overlapping look of tissue paper on glue instead of the pieces lying flat on the bottle. And the spray glue dried pretty quickly and it became harder at the end to get pieces to stick.

Then I used my X-ACTO scissors to cut out pieces from the foam (for the eyes, nose, mouth and buttons) and from the felt for the scarf and hat. I used that handy little Elmer’s glue pen to attach everything to my snowmen.

And that’s it! I don’t have any battery-powered tea lights right now, but I must get some (at Walmart!) because I’m sure that light coming through the white tissue paper will be so pretty. I was making these with a family gift recipient in mind, but they’re so cute, I want to keep them! I think we will be making more 🙂 I mean, I already have the supplies I need thanks to just stocking up at Walmart!

Do you want a chance to win the ENTIRE Elmer’s Memory Keeping Wall from Walmart?! (See my first picture in this post? Yea! ALL of that stuff! A $250 value!) Just click the image below to enter:

Read more details about my shopping trip at Walmart in my google+ story. You can find Elmer’s on facebook and twitter and find X-ACTO on facebook.

~This project has been compensated as part of a social shopper insights study for #ElmersHoliday #gluenglitter #collectivebias #CBias. All photos and opinions are my own.

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