Stamping Styrofoam Christmas Ornaments

A while back, an awesome friend of mine sent me some Styrofoam star shaped ornaments. I really wanted to do something cool with them. Me being me, I wanted to do it with nail polish.

The first thing I did was try to paint polish directly onto one of them. BIG MISTAKE. Nail polish will cause Styrofoam to melt. Crud. Lesson learned. At this point I actually abandoned the whole decorating with polish thing for several months until I happened to stumble across a blog post explaining that if you coat Styrofoam with Mod Podge, you can paint it with whatever you want. The important thing is to check the bottle or their website first to make sure it’s the right type. I went with the glossy kind to I could make sure I could see where I’d painted since Styrofoam is not shiny.

The process of coating the ornaments with Mod Podge took a couple days. I painted one side of each ornament at a time, let it dry for several hours, and then painted the other side. It only really needs about half an hour, but I found if I waited a while longer, they didn’t feel so tacky. I used two coats to ensure I didn’t miss any spots. I didn’t want to ruin any more of these babies! I used some cheapo paint brushes, and had no problems.

 I tried painting the remains of the one I wrecked with polish to see how it looked. It was okay, but I knew I could do better. What would look better? Stamping!

I busted out the Metallic Red Cherimoya polish I reviewed a little while a got and gave it a try. It worked without a hitch! I stamped directly onto the Mod Podge using a non sticky rectangular stamper I got from Bundle Monster. This really worked well, and made it easy to keep the designs lined up. I used stamping buffet style plates for the most part, and used designs where it was okay if there was some overlap. I also used a couple Bundle Monster stamping polishes for the others as I wanted nice vibrant color. Each star took about half an hour to stamp. I did have some empty spaces, which I filled in by dabbing on polish with a makeup sponge – the same kind you’d use to do a gradient.

Here’s how they all looked when I was done.

I’m really happy with how these came out. I think I’m going to hate taking my tree down!

I hope you all have a great holiday, no matter what you celebrate.