DIY Park Map Ornament: Turn a Free Guide Map into Mickey Ears for the Tree
How to make a Mickey-ears Christmas ornament from an old Disney park map with mod podge, a paper mache ball, and cardboard ears. Supply list and full steps.
The best souvenir in any Disney park is still free, printed on thin paper, and handed out by the thousands. A guide map costs Disney pennies and costs you nothing, and unlike the $30 ornaments in the Christmas shop, a map from your own trip has your actual dates on it. Fold marks and all, it is the rare souvenir that gets more interesting with age.
Which is why gluing one to a ball is a better idea than it sounds. This project turns a park map into a Mickey-ears ornament using mod podge and about an hour of actual work. The map paper is the secret. Guide maps are printed on lightweight stock that drinks up decoupage medium and hugs a curved surface far better than cardstock or photo paper would. It wrinkles, and the wrinkles are part of the look.
One sourcing note before the supply list. Disney has spent the last few years steering everyone toward the app, and printed guide maps are no longer stacked at every turnstile the way they once were. They still exist; as of mid-2026, both Walt Disney World and Disneyland print updated guide maps and hand them out at the park entrances, and Guest Relations can point you to a rack if you don’t spot one. If your last trip predates the ornament idea, resort maps, cruise line Navigators from older sailings, and even scanned-and-printed vintage maps all work the same way.
What you need
- One or more park maps
- A paper mache ball ornament (Michaels and most craft stores carry them in the raw wood and paper section, usually for a few dollars)
- Mod podge, matte or gloss, your call
- A foam or acrylic brush
- Scrap cardboard or cardstock for the ears
- Scissors
Optional, for the glitter version:
- Fine glitter
- School glue and a second brush
- A hot glue gun
- Cling wrap and a baking tray (this matters, explained below)
Make the ears first
Trace two circles on cardboard. No compass needed; the mod podge bottle or any jar lid in the right proportion to your ball works as a template. Before you cut, add a small square tab to the bottom edge of each circle. The tab is the whole engineering of this project. It folds at a right angle and gives you a flat surface to glue against the ball, which is the difference between ears that survive December and ears that fall off during the tree-trimming.
Cut both circles out with their tabs attached and set them aside.
The glitter decision
Plain map-covered ears look clean and let the cartography read from across the room. Glittered ears look like they came from a park shop. Both are defensible.
If glitter wins, coat each ear with school glue, dredge it through glitter, and let it dry fully before assembly. And do this over cling wrap stretched across a baking tray. Stray glitter sticks to the wrap instead of migrating through your house, and when you finish, you fold the wrap in on itself, ball it up, and throw the whole mess away. This is the single best glitter containment method I know of, and it scales to any project involving children and shiny particulate.
Skipping glitter simplifies things: glue the ears on by their tabs first, wrap map paper over the tabs and up onto the ears, then continue covering the ball. The map hides the seam.
Wrapping the ball
Hot glue the ear tabs to the top of the ball, spaced like Mickey’s, with the hanging loop between them.
Now the map. You have two composition choices. A single large panel, say the Magic Kingdom hub with the castle centered, reads as one coherent image. Or cut smaller pieces from all four park maps and patchwork them around the ball, which gets Everest, Spaceship Earth, and the monorail loop onto one ornament (the resort map is the sleeper pick here, since it is the only one that shows the transportation network).
Brush mod podge onto a section of ball, press the map on, and smooth outward. Flat paper on a sphere must fold, so let it. Work the creases down in the direction they want to go. The one non-negotiable technique point: get mod podge between the layers of every fold, not just on top. A fold glued only at the surface pops up later. A fold saturated through is permanent.
Around the ears, make a straight relief cut in the paper in front of each ear and snip out a small notch, so the flaps can wrap back around the base of the ear instead of bunching against it.
Finish with a full topcoat of mod podge over everything to seal it, and let it dry hanging so nothing sticks.
The result
An ornament with your trip’s actual map on it, made for maybe $4 in materials. Date the bottom in fine marker; these have a way of becoming the ornament that gets unwrapped first every year.
If this puts you in a crafting mood, the tile coaster tutorial uses the same mod podge bottle and the same logic (paper ephemera, permanent object), and the glow ears project covers the wearable side of DIY ears. For maps headed to the tree from a holiday trip specifically, the Very Merry Christmas Party guide covers whether that hard ticket is worth it in the first place.