I hope you are enjoying all of the Disney Christmas crafts and tutorials that I have put together. This week I am focused on ornaments, and today’s is the Donald Duck Christmas tree ornament tutorial! I am going to use the same basic ornament shape that I shared with you earlier this week. Click HERE to go to that post and then come back here to see how I added elements to make the ornament look like Donald Duck.
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Donald Duck Christmas Tree Ornament – Step by Step
Once you have the basic Christmas ornament SVG uploaded into Design Space, click on the image and adjust the size. I decided to make mine 5″ in height. You can either drag the double arrow in the lower right corner of the image to resize, or enter the exact height you want in the Size area on the top panel. I circled the size area in blue at the top of this image for you to make it easy for you to find.
When you click on the image, you will noticed that all of the pieces of the Christmas ornament will resize together. This is because I have grouped them together. Since I am going to want to alter the white piece, I am going to click the Ungroup button in the upper right corner, indicated with the blue arrow in the image below. Ungrouping the layers will allow me to more easily work with just the white layer.
Using Slice In Cricut Design Space
Now I want to cut the white layer in half so I can make the top half blue and the bottom half white. This will make the whole ornament look more like Donald Duck and his blue shirt. To do this, I will use Slice, which allows you to cut something. If you need a reminder sheet as to what the various action buttons do, you can download one for free HERE.
For Slice to work properly, you need to have two and only two items or layers selected. One layer is what you are cutting or slicing and the other is what you are using to tell Cricut Design Space where you want that cut, or what portion you want cut away. To do this I am going to go to the Shapes button on the left hand side of the screen. I have it circled in blue in the image below. I am going to insert a square, which I am pointing out with the blue arrow in the image below.
Next I resize the square so that it is large enough to cover the upper half of the white layer. I then select both the square and the white layer at the same time. You can do this either by making a window around just the square and the white layer, or by picking those layers from the layers panel on the right hand side of the screen. When picking directly from the layers panel on the right, you will need to hold down the shift key on your keyboard to pick more than one layer.
Once you have these two layers selected, you will see that the Slice button in the lower right corner of the screen will be activated. I point it out with the blue arrow in the image below. Click on that to slice the white layer in half.
Now you can delete that big gray square you inserted. We only needed that to tell Cricut Design Space where to slice the Christmas ornament shape. There will also be an additional gray half circle created from the slicing process. You can delete that also.
We will leave the bottom half of the ornament white, to represent Donald Duck’s feathers. I will change the color of the top half of the ornament to blue, to represent Donald’s shirt. I indicate where to go to change the color with the blue arrow in the image below.
Now we just have to make the yellow stripes and the bow for the shirt of this Donald Duck Christmas tree ornament.
Adding the details
To make the yellow lines that are on the collar of Donald Duck’s shirt I am going to start by clicking on the Shapes button on the left hand side of the screen and inserting a square. In the lower right corner of that square is a little padlock icon, and when you click on that you can resize the square to be a rectangle. I circled the padlock icon in the image below to help you find it.
The second way to unlock and resize your square is on the top panel of Design Space, which I have circled at the top of the image below. There is a small padlock icon there also, and then you can type in the exact dimensions that you want your rectangle to be. For this project I made my rectangle 1/4 wide by 2 1/8 long, but your measurements might be different depending on the size and shape of the Christmas ornament image you use.
Next we want to rotate this rectangle 45 degrees. To do this we are going to use the Rotate function on the top panel of Design Space, which I have circled in blue in the image below. Just type in 45 and hit enter and your rectangle should look like mine does in the image below.
Now we need to make a second rectangle just like this for the other side of Donald’s shirt. To do this you can right click on the rectangle and a list will pop up. Choose Duplicate from the list that pops up. Duplicate is like doing a copy and paste move all with one click. If you are not able to right click, there is also a Duplicate button in the upper right corner of the screen, over by the Make It button.
Since we want the second rectangle to be facing the opposite direction, we are going to click on it and then use the Flip button and select Flip Horizontal. I have the Flip button pointed out with the blue arrows in the image below.
Now we just have to move the second rectangle so that the bottoms overlap and create a V, as shown in the image below. I also wanted to make sure that I have the tops of these two rectangles lined up so that they match when I place them on the Donald Duck Christmas tree ornament. To do this I select both rectangles at the same time and use the Align tool, and pick Align Top, as indicated with the blue arrows in the image below.
Last but not least, with both of the rectangles selected, click on the Weld button in the lower right corner of the screen. This will join the two lines into one V shape. Don’t forget to go up to the top panel and change the color of your V to yellow.
Time for the bow!
Now all we need is the bow and our Donald Duck Christmas tree ornament will be complete! If you want to use the same bow shape that I used you can click on Images in Cricut Design Space and search Donald, or type #MD3C3EC2 into the search bar, since that is the ID number for this exact image.
Let’s look at the layers panel on the right hand side of the image below. You will see that Donald has a lot of layer. All we really need for this project is the bow so I am going to click on each layer from the Layers Panel one at a time and delete the ones I do not need. This is a nice function, that you can click on just one colored layer at a time from the Layers Panel and delete them. This makes it easier to select things, instead of trying to click on the right part of the image on the Design Space canvas.
Once you have all of the layers deleted except for the bow, you can click on the icon in the lower right corner, which I have circled in the image below, and then drag that out to resize the bow and make it larger.
After I felt like the bow was a good size for my Donald Duck Christmas tree ornament, I decided to adjust the rotation of the bow. I did that by clicking and dragging to adjust the bow how I wanted it. That is it! All that is left is to cut the pieces out. You can click Make It and the Cricut will sort things on to different cutting mats for you and tell you what order to load them into the machine.
Donald Duck Christmas Tree Ornament Video
Since I know that some people like to see the process for creating things come together in Design Space I did a quick video that goes over these same steps. You can find additional Cricut videos at my YouTube channel.
Assemble your Donald Duck Christmas Tree Ornament
I cut my ornament out of cardstock, and if you string several character ornaments together they would make an adorable banner! I also think that these would be cute cut from iron on vinyl and pressed on a Christmas tree skirt.
To put this cardstock version of the Donald Duck Christmas tree ornament together you will need some adhesive. I like to use my Creative Memories tape runner and my Zig glue pen.
First, start with the large pieces for Donald’s body and shirt. On the back side of the pieces place some double sided tape with your tape runner, and attach those to the black backing piece.
Next I am going to use my Zig glue pen to place the glue exactly where I want it on the black backing piece, and then put the gray ornament top pieces right over the glue. I love how I can basically write or draw with the fine tip Zig glue pen to perfectly place my glue into even the tiniest of spots.
Now I place the yellow V that represents the strip on Donald’s shirt collar. I actually placed the glue on the back of the yellow V and since it is wet I can place it and slide it around a little if I need to adjust the placement.
As you can see from the next picture I had a little helper in my craft room. Yes Donald, I know I still need to add the bow to the ornament, but I want to show everyone an extra special trick for the bow before I glue it in place.
The cardstock that I used for the bow has a white core, which means that the sheet of paper is white and the color is applied to it, instead of solid core cardstock which made with the color running through the entire sheet of paper. Think of it like the difference between using solid wood where you would see the wood grain all the way through versus using a wood veneer where you only see the grain on the top, not running through the sides.
Well I personally did not like the look of the white edges from the white core paper for this project, so I took a red marker and just ran that along the edge of all of the pieces for the bow. In the image below I have inked the edges of the piece in the center and the one on the left. The one on the far right does not have ink on the edges. I like the way the added step of inking makes the shapes pop.
Start by gluing the center knot part of the bow in place and then that will help you to position the sides of the bow. That’s it! Now your Donald Duck Christmas tree ornament is complete! I think Donald approves of it!
I hope that you enjoyed this post, and that you stop back every day from now until Christmas to see what other Disney Christmas crafts I have planned for you! I am doing 25 Days of Disney Christmas Crafts to inspire you to add more Disney to your life while using your Cricut for crafting. If you want to see the whole line up of crafts you can go HERE.
