The trick with ornaments is batching. Roll everything on Saturday morning, cut everything before lunch, and spend Sunday painting while they are bone dry. Doing them one at a time is how a weekend project becomes a December-long project.
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Pressed fern discs
Roll a slab, press a real fern frond into it hard enough to leave every vein, peel it away and cut a circle around the impression. Punch the hole before it dries, not after. These are the ones people ask you to make again next year.
Minimal snowflakes
Skip the intricate six-fold cutter. Three straight cuts radiating from a centre point reads as a snowflake from two metres away, which is the only distance a tree ornament is ever viewed from.
Speckled stars
Flick watered-down black acrylic off a stiff brush onto white clay once it is dry. The speckle is what makes air dry clay read as fired stoneware, and it takes about ninety seconds per batch.
Tiny hanging pots
Thumb-sized pinch pots with two holes near the rim and a loop of twine. Fill them with a sprig of dried gypsophila. They look like something from a shop that charges $18 each.
Initial tags
Stamp a single letter into a small rounded rectangle. These double as gift tags in December and place settings the rest of the year, which is the highest use-per-effort ratio on this list.
