With just a few days to go until Santa descends the chimney, I thought I’d show a few of the makes I decorated our tiny flat with this year.
This is the first year I’ve gone properly Christmas crafting crazy… not really sure if there was any particular reason, though some of the tutorials I saw in last month’s issue of Mollie Makes were a little bit too hard to resist.
Anyway, being the impatient crafter that I am, everything that I made this year can be whipped up in under two hours (by that, I mean two hours each… I’m not supercrafter), so if you want to add some finishing touches to your festive interiors this year, these are all great fun to put together.
Along with each picture, I’ve included links to tutorials or templates, where applicable, as well as some advice for each kind of make.
Merry Christmas, and hopefully Santa will bring you some crafty goodness… I hope he is kind to me this year to make 2012 my “handmade” year.
Felt shapes: reindeer, hearts, gingerbread men
These were the things I saw in Mollie Makes and knew I had to make. It’s simpler than it looks to make something like this – especially as the template is handily provided. All you need is a piece of felt, some stuffing (or if like me you run out, you can use cotton wool or something similar), some thread, buttons and a fair amount of patience for the fiddly bits.
I got the bells for the reindeer from The Works, while the buttons I got from one of my favourite local shops, Claire Grove Buttons in the Castle Arcade in Cardiff. The felt was from Cardiff Market, which had a good selection in stock this year.
Each heart, reindeer or gingerbread man took me around 1 hour or 2 hours to make – the hearts are the longest because of the fiddly button/sequin sewing involved. These could be whipped up a lot quicker if you had a sewing machine – so that’s worth bearing in mind.
These also make great little gift tags if you like to do something a bit special with your wrapping.
Festive food card banners
From this...
To this.
I like banners, and I saw this simple tutorial on The Mollie Makes website. Although the original uses vintage books (and looks fabulous for it), I knew I had an abundance of food photographs lying around from my stash of recipes I’ve collected over the years.
These were simple to put together, and only really require card, whatever you want to decorate it with and ribbon. You can embellish them as much or as little as you like – I used “table confetti”, gold pen, and dots made using a holepunch from spare card.
Maybe next year I’ll have enough festive photos to use my own… that would be extra special. For now, I used pictures from a combination of Olive, Delicious, BBC Good Food and Jamie magazine. Jamie is probably the best because the matte paper reflects the light the least.
If you’re fairly speedy, you could put together one of these banners in about 30-45 minutes, taking a bit longer if you want to be more careful, or add more embellishment.
Oh, one last thing – make sure you photocopy/scan any of the recipes that you want to keep!
Cardboard wreaths
You can see the gold wreath on the photo on the left. The right shows some simple gold cardboard stars, which are scattered throughout the flat for a tiny festive touch.
Looking around the shops, more traditional wreaths are beautiful, but they can be expensive to buy, and they look like they are fairly complicated to make. Taking inspiration from a wooden wreath I saw in a magazine, I “designed” these myself – If you can call arranging circles around a ring “designing”.
I made three for my flat – two gold versions for my windows, and a red and green version for the front door. To make the circles I simply drew around various cylindrical objects in my house (it’s a good idea to keep them all uniform, I think).
I used different types of paper, but other than that left it pretty simple. I used gold card, card covered in foil paper, and card covered in extra fine glitter. Sometimes I think the simplest designs make the most striking and effective.
The gold wreaths look especially effective at night-time when the lights make them sparkle. You could make very miniature versions of these to use as gift tags as well, or if you have any left over when cutting out the circles, you could use them for that purpose.
This is probably the item on this page that will take you the longest to create. The large one did take me around three hours, but the smaller ones only took about 90 mins-two hours. But this is one of those that requires very little concentration that you could stick a Christmas film on mindlessly cut out and stick until it’s done.
Christmas garland banners
I was having a Christmas meal... I don't usually have an 8 seater table blocking up the valuable space in the flat...
These are probably my favourite decorations, and the ones that drew the most admiration. They’re big and they’re bold, so they work best if you have a plain wall with a fairly large expanse to hang them from.
They’re simple to make, if a little fiddly at times. I saw the tutorial on how to make them in Homes and Antiques magazine, but they were also in Sainsbury’s magazine. Basically, you cut out two squares of paper, create a concertina from the paper by folding, attach the two together and fan them out to create a circle.
I used a mixture of red, green and festive paper (if you look closely you can see reindeer and penguins). The red and green I got from another of my favourite local stores, the Pen and Paper in the Royal Arcade… in fact I also used that for the food banners above.
After initially only making one, I thought it looked a little lonely on its own, so I put together a green neighbour for it. Each banner again took a couple of hours, but you can spend even longer on it if you want to add more embellishments and so on. Left over baubles, bells, buttons and ribbon make good additions.
That’s it…. now time to put your feet up and grab a mince pie, or Christmas biscuit perhaps. What have you been making this year?
Hey! Loving the festive food banners – great way of recycling old magazines. Those concertina things are cool too – may do some valentine’s ones!
Thanks!
I love the concertina things too, I’m going to be sad to take them down. I’m thinking of making some to go up there permanently, but I’m worried people will think I leave my Christmas decorations up permanently – what colours do you think would make it obvious it’s not Christmas? Bearing in mind we have a red sofa directly underneath it so it kinda needs to complement that. I suppose you could make quite a muted one, with say beiges, browns and light colours, maybe chuck a couple of florals in – what do you think?
I want to live in this Winter Wonderland! x
Doesn’t look quite so great when it’s a mess, I managed to sneakily leave those bits out