How To: DIY Custom Snow Globes

There’s something almost magical about snow globes. I’ve loved them since childhood, and our kids love them now too. So I, of course, excitedly said yes when my friend Kristi asked if I’d want to make personalized snow globes with her. This is a perfect craft to do for kids (or with kids, if yours are a little older) – it’s creative, fun, and inexpensive.

Materials for this project are pretty simple:

• A jar for each globe (you can use jars from your fridge that you’ve cleaned, or get mason jars for pretty cheap)
• Hot glue gun
• Water
• Glitter
• Photos, trimmed out and laminated
• Any other additions you’d like – garland/tree branches, beads, etc.

Start by taking a photo of each child. For ours I tried to have a Christmas theme. C is wearing a Santa hat, J is holding our elf, Orville, and E has a little Lego Christmas tree propped in front of her. Then print your photos on plain old printer paper, trim out

the background, and laminate them. When you cut out the laminated image, make sure to leave extra around the photo so it stays sealed and water doesn’t reach your image.

I bought a sprig of garland at the craft store and we pulled pieces off to serve as the background for our photos. Kristi had some small gravel and we also had some green beads to hot glue around the feet to help secure the photo.

One note – make sure that you don’t glue anything too close to the edge of the lid – it’ll make it difficult to close the jar securely (and it really doesn’t show up very much at all, so don’t worry about needing to cover the whole thing).

Once you’ve finished securing everything to the lid, fill your jar with water and glitter, along with any other little items you’d like. For the girls, we used some more green beads, and for the boys we added some small Lego pieces. Make sure to not fill the jar ALL the way to the top, because you have to account for the items displacing a little of the liquid.

When we were looking for tips, we saw some people suggest using baby oil to slow the glitter down a bit. We tried this, and the glitter initially clumped together like big blobs in a lava lamp. I ended up rinsing all of mine out, and I think it works just fine with only water.

Once you’re happy with how your jars look, use hot glue to secure the lid. We put a bead around the edge, and then on the bottom, too – where the two parts of the lid meet. The bead of glue on the bottom also serves to keep the jars from sliding around as much, which is nice.

Here are the finished products – what do you think?

We’re going to add some ribbon around ours to hide the glue, but otherwise I think they’re pretty perfect! The kids really like them, too – well, the boys, anyway. :)