How to Make Adorable Wood Slice Owl Ornaments and an Owl Tree

Here’s an owl craft that is both simple and adorable!  And if the kids don’t want to help with this one, it’s a fun and relaxing mom project.  We used wood slice ornaments from Hobby Lobby to make owls with button eyes.  Display your owls with a door hanging or an owl tree – see details below.

These owls are quite easy to make.  Here’s what we used to make them:

• Wood slice ornaments – from Hobby Lobby in the Christmas section (yes, they have Christmas stuff already!)
• Wood-look buttons – from Walmart in the sewing notions aisle.  Some seem to be real wood and others are not.
• Yellow felt
• Brown pipe cleaners
• Hot glue
• Wood burning tool
• Pencil

I was so happy to find the wood slice ornaments because I was thinking that I was going to have to drill the holes myself!  They were only $3.99 for 4, and I think all the holiday stuff was 40% off too.  Not bad!  The photo above also shows the buttons from Walmart’s sewing notions aisle.

Gresham and Owen helped me with this owl craft project.  Gresham loves celebrating all holidays and seasons, but he especially likes getting out the fall decorations because his birthday is in the fall.  We dumped out all the buttons and some googly eyes to try out owl faces and decide what we liked best.

We decided that we liked layers of buttons better than the googly eyes.  Gresham suggested wood burning some feathers on the owls, which turned out to be a great idea.

The wood burning is definitely an adult job.

I put the eyes where I wanted them for reference and then drew the outline of the wings with pencil before burning them.  It’s best to do the wood burning before gluing anything else on.

Then we folded pipe cleaners to make the legs and cut out little felt beaks.

I used hot glue to assemble the owls.  Be careful, because it is very difficult to remove hot glue from wood if you put a button in the wrong place!  I put one eye over too far to the center, and Aidan had to remove it with his pocket knife.  (It’s handy having a teen son in the house!)  The feet are glued to the back of the wood slice.

The finished owls are so adorable, and I love the fact that each one is different!  One of them has a light brown beak which was a piece of drift wood or something that came in the button package.

It’s hard to choose a favorite, but I think I like the one in the middle best.

There are so many things to do with your finished owls!  Use them as gift tags, give them away to friends, give them to a teacher to hang on her bulletin board.  We’re thinking they will even make great Christmas tree ornaments!

Make an Owl Tree:

It would be so fun to have each person in the family design an owl and then hang it on the tree!

I found the wooden box at Michael’s (near the wooden crates and cute home decor, NOT in the floral section).  My husband cut a piece of floral foam to fit and then put in this tree branch.  It’s best if you can get a tree branch from a tree that needs trimming (this was from a cedar elm tree) or a neighbor’s pile of clippings, etc.  You could probably use multiple sticks in the floral foam, but it wouldn’t be nearly as cute.

We covered the floral foam with a layer of silk fall leaves.  They came loose in a bag from Hobby Lobby, in the fall decor section at the front of the store.

Before making the tree, we also tried making this door hanging:

This is also sooooo easy!  We have a bag of nicely cut sticks that came from my parent’s tree, and I simply hung three of the owls on one of the sticks and then hung that on the door with some ribbon and a hook.  I used hot glue to make loops in the ribbon so that the stick is not permanently attached.

In the end, I decided that I liked the tree idea better (I wanted to be able to see and enjoy the owls!) but the door hanging sure is cute too.

Now it’s starting to feel like fall around our house!  Until we step outside into the 90 degree heat, that is!  Oh well, fall weather will arrive at some point…

Need more fall craft ideas?

• Make some Fall Tree “Snow” Globes

• Build some Candy Corn Catapults

• Star Wars Pumpkin Carving – With a Drill

These owls make great Christmas ornaments too!