Christmas Paper Crafts

Merry Christmas, JAKS readers! I hope your day was merry and bright =D

I have so many super cute Christmas pictures that I'm going to break it up into several different blog posts. Plus I know when my parents come visit they will take a bunch more pictures so at least I'll have several posts to make in the next few days.

Today's post is about the various paper crafts I made to decorate for Christmas. First up is a large, 3-D six pointed paper snowflake. The tutorial I used to make it can be found here on Instructables. It's made from six pieces of standard copy/printer paper. In the original tutorial the author uses a stapler to connect the points but I used double sided tape instead since I was too lazy to get our stapler out of our craft box upstairs.

Hanging in the archway between our kitchen and our living room.

The next craft is a Christmas card holder. I used this tutorial from Kojo Designs based on her tea wreath. I'm not really happy with the ribbon I used but it was the only stuff I had around the house that matched. The original author used 24 clothespins but I only have 22 on mine to allow a little more room for each card. Last year I made this Christmas tree out of an old magazine and used it to hold our cards. They are both fun but I think I like the wreath a bit better since I can see the card faces easier.

I'm not sure how many years this will last but until it falls apart, I really like it.

Next up are the paper ornaments hanging in our bedroom window. The tutorial came from I Am Momma, Hear Me Roar. It's a quick and easy craft and the result is very pretty. I didn't have too many sheets of scrapbook paper in Christmas colors lying around so unlike the original author I only have two side strips instead of three on the big ones and only one strip on the little ones. They are hung with fishing line.

Please ignore the rain on our window.

The paper snowflakes are my favorite craft. These remind me of my childhood and I haven't made them since, well, I was a child. I wanted to make them more advanced so I used two different tutorials for inspiration. The first tutorial came from Instructables and the second came from How About Orange. I even convinced the Hubs to make half of the big ones and he is so amazing that he just came up with his on his own. There are two more big snowflakes and two small snowflakes on another of our smaller windows but I couldn't get a good picture of them. K decided we needed the small ones to represent her and her soon-to-born baby sister since she decided the big ones were me and Daddy.

These are on our front laundry room window.

The last two paper crafts are for K to play with. The first one is a printable nativity scene I found on How About Orange. K loves it! She continually gives me Mary (since she's the Mom) and she keeps asking me if she can sleep with Baby Jesus. I'm going to leave these out until they break. Perhaps next year I'll get an actual set she can really play with.

I had to darken the image quite a bit to get the faces to show up so our kitchen floor isn't actually brown, it's gray. ;)

The last craft is a tutorial I found on Make It and Love It. A little while back I found this set of Melissa & Doug stickers at Meijer and one of the pages has these little sticker dress up dolls that K really enjoyed and actually did a super job at dressing them up. So, when I saw the magnetic version I knew K would like them. It was a very tedious project that A and I did on Christmas Eve night. It was one of those projects that seemed like it would be quick but took a lot longer than you expect. It was worth it though because right after she opened it she was playing with them. The only problem we've encountered so far is that the heads on these dolls are very large and their necks are super tiny so the magnet on one of the necks has already cracked but thankfully the adhesive held so the head hasn't come off. I'm not sure how to remedy this situation since K uses the head to pull the doll off the fridge. If anyone has any ideas, please let me know!

The paper doll book and roll of self adhesive magnet came from Hobby Lobby.

I promise I'll post photos of the family in the next entry. =D