Procrastination Proof Crafts: Candy Cane Ornament Upcycle

Procrastination Proof Crafts is a series focusing on simple seasonal crafts that can be done in one or two days, for all of us who save a ton of holiday craft ideas … and then wait too long to start them.

After last week’s FOlio exploring my knitted holiday décor projects from last year, this time we’re going back to an ornament upcycle I originally did around 2013 or so. Although this means I don’t have full in process photos, I did recently do some mending on a couple of the ornaments after several moves and staff kitty Yuna’s rambunctious kitten years left them a little worse for wear. Hopefully those photos will give you a good idea of how this was done.

One of the first years I lived in my own apartment, my mom gave me a set of plastic candy cane ornaments with my college’s logo on them. These were about the size and shape of larger candy canes, but were striped in my school colors (crimson and cream) with the school’s logo printed in white on the red stripe.

You can see in this pre-mending photo what the original ornaments looked like.

I enjoyed them for a few years, but as I got further from my undergrad days I didn’t really want that much alma mater representation on my smallish tree.  During a Michael’s trip for a different project, I came across some interesting novelty Christmas yarn. This was when “ribbon” yarn was trendy; this yarn was a flat, ½” wide loosely woven ribbon with sparkles on the red version and tiny sequins on the white version. I looked at the red and white colors and suddenly had an idea of how to repurpose my candy cane ornaments.

I do still have a bit of both yarns in my stash, which came in handy for these repairs!

For my original project, I hot glued one end of the red yarn to the straight end of one candy cane and started wrapping the yarn around the bottom section of the cane until I liked the thickness. Then I cut it, hot glued that end down and started the next section in white yarn. Because the yarn’s ribbon was loosely woven I found just a thin line of glue all the way across the cut end sunk through several layers and held everything securely. Then I just kept going, alternating colors until I reached the other end. I did leave the plastic loop for the ornament hook on each candy cane uncovered – since this loop was dark red plastic I didn’t need to do anything else to it, but if it had been a different color I would have tried painting it.

These have held up pretty well over a decade! As a kitten, Yuna was pretty rough on our entire Christmas tree, so a few of them had come a little unraveled in the last few years, but they were very easy to reglue. If you don’t have plastic candy cane ornaments already, you could likely use thick gauge wire, or wire from a clothes hanger if you had tools that would allow you to cut the straight piece off and bend it.

Unfortunately, I don’t actually know what exact yarn I used  -- because I never intended it for a knitting project, it didn’t get logged in my Ravelry before I lost the labels. Ribbon yarn is harder to find in general these days, but I think you could use actual ribbon and get a similar effect. When poking around the internet, I found this sequined ribbon that would make a nice substitute.

After a little hot glue, they’re as good as new!

Have you ever upcycled ornaments you already owned? Has this post given you ideas about ornaments you could upcycle? Let me know in the comments!