Sparkly Letter DIY

I know I promised a round up of Christmas parties today, but there are so many (over 50!) that I’m working on getting everything organized.  In the meantime, I want to share with you one of my favorite crafts for the Christmas Milk & Cookies party:  the letter holders for the buffet labels.  The pictures from the party really don’t show the depth of color, or just how sparkly and fun they are.  The best part?  They are totally reuseable.  Seriously, we’ve moved them over from the buffet on top of our TV cabinet to hold Christmas cards from family and friends (we don’t have a fireplace, so we have no mantle).

Typically our Christmas cards become a total mess, but these are a great way to display them without worrying about cards fluttering to the ground from either the air vents or my toddler running around all over the place.

Honestly, I got the idea for these letters from a display of 1.5 inch cookie photo holders at Kohl’s.  At $4 a piece on sale, I knew I could do something just as fun for less.  Not to mention, they didn’t have all the letters I was looking for.  Now, I really wanted to make letters that looked like baked sugar cookies, but I’m just not that talented, so I switched to plain old glitter; which I think turned out to be better for the display in the long run.  The hardest parts were finding letters that would stand on their own (I wanted smaller, but these letters from Michael’s were the best I could find at the time), and something to use to hold cards.

I looked up tutorials on how to twist wire, how to embellish plain photo holders and the like, but I wanted something simple – REALLY simple.  I was about to go forward with giant paperclips from Target, but then I ran across these fellas from Dollar Tree:

They’re perfect for this application!  You know it too, because I’m not the first person to think of using these little cuties.  I won’t bore you with all the specifics of adding glitter to letters.  I think it’s pretty self explanatory: paint, glue, glitter, let dry, glue ornament hook to the back.  I used gorilla glue, but a hot glue gun would have probably been faster.

Hope everyone has a happy Wednesday…only a few days left until Chrustmas!