Turn Old Tires into Christmas Ornaments

If you’re looking for a fun project for the holiday season and want to repurpose old tires, look no further. This DIY project is perfect.

Christmas is undoubtedly the biggest and most popular holiday in the world and this year’s edition is almost here with us. Everyone’s looking forward to creating and collecting unique Christmas ornaments to adorn their homes and show off to guests. What could be more creative than decorating your space with Christmas ornaments made from old tires? Not only is it a great way to get rid of old tires, or rather recycle them, but it’s also a fun undertaking for you and your family. So, let’s get to it.

What You Need

• At least 2 old car tires
• Some ¹/₄” plywood
• Jigsaw
• Pencil
• A bottle of Liquid nails
• A staple gun with staples
• Paper glue
• Spray paint, primer, and safety painting gloves
• 2 galvanized buckets

Step-by-step Instructions for Turning Old Car Tires into Colorful Ornaments

Step 1:

Thoroughly wash and scrub the tires to remove dirt and mud particles. We recommend using some all-purpose cleaner and a brush, but you may also use soap.

Step 2:

Place the tires on top of the plywood and trace them with a sharp pencil. Then, draw a smaller circle about an inch or two inside the big circle. You’ll cut the plywood using the second circle to get the dimensions of the tire fronts. This will leave an inch or two of the tires exposed. Cut out these inner circles with the jigsaw.

Step 3:

Apply the Liquid Nails on the edges of the plywood circle and stick it to one side of the tire.

Step 4:

Reinforce by stapling the outer edges of the plywood to the tire using the staple gun.

Step 5:

Repeat steps 1-4 on the second tire.

Spice Up Your Christmas Ornaments

Notably, there are several ways in which you can progress from here and make some creative Christmas ornaments, but for this one, we choose to keep it simple.

Step 6:

Get some Christmas-themed stencil designs from Pinterest, Royal Design Studio or wherever else on the Internet and print out several copies. From our side, we cut out two designs and spray painted one white and the other red.

Step 7:

Spray paint the tires and plywood with colors that compliment those you chose for the stencil designs and let them dry. We choose blue and green for ours.

Step 8:

Stick the stencil designs to the plywood on the tire using paper glue, and that’s about it. Well, if you like how everything looks, that is. If you don’t, you may choose to add some accessories to enhance the look. We decided to go with some small galvanized buckets from Amazon which we placed on top of the tires to give that festive look.

We plucked out the handles from the buckets and bored two holes at the bottom of each bucket and one at the top of each tire. We then took a long wire and ran it through the holes on the buckets to form loops and then safely secured them under the top wall of each tire. We did it such that the bottoms of the buckets were on top while the “mouths” or the tops sat directly on the tires. The end result looks like the “caps” of Christmas tree ornaments that hold the hooks. And that’s how we made our very own cheap but beautiful decoration for Christmas!

Many people view old car tires as useless and carelessly dump them in the garage or around the home compound. However, these pieces of worn-out or punctured rubber can be quite useful in a lot of ways, one of which is as materials for Christmas ornaments. Of course, there are lots of holiday ornaments to make from tires, but we just featured one of them, which worked wonders for us. Now bring on the holidays!

Also, feel free to chip in with additional ideas or suggestions on this topic in the comments section.

Photo credits for composite featured image:

Tires: dave_7 from Lethbridge, Canada, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0 background removed, image recolored.

Christmas tree: Out-of-focus multicolored lighted Christmas tree on black background; image by Eric Perez, via Unsplash.com.

Blue snowflake: Image by Piotr Siedlecki, via PublicDomainPictures.net, CC0, white background removed.

Red reindeer: Image by ROverhate, via Pixabay.com, CC0, background removed.