Christmas Eve Coloring Books

It's Christmas Eve, and we're enjoying the vacation with cookies, milk, and a stash of new coloring books for the winter.  

These would make great absolute last minute stocking stuffers.  Each book has 6 pages to color.

Get the coloring books here!

Chistmas Papercrafting 2018: Christmas Cards

Hi!  It's your hosts, Lily and Z (yes, the human has pulled out the stash of Christmas sweaters...luckily she doesn't have enough for everyone yet...) with this year's stash of Christmas cards.

The human might have fallen behind with her card-sending this year, but we haven't.  It really is customary for us to use an old-fashioned fountain pen and real ink in a bottle to write our cards, like the human does.  It's only a matter of time before the calligraphy and manuscript illumination classes start again.

This year, we have 12 miniature Tasha Tudor cards, depicting old-fashioned Christmas in rural New England.  Having spent some time in central VT with the human, the churches-in-a-town-square-covered-with-snow cards are SPOT ON.  These cards are all miniaturized versions of vintage Caspari cards, with the same message the real card would have had inside.

Get your Christmas cards HERE.

Last year's Christmas cards are HERE.

Christmas 2018 Papercraft-a-long: Advent Calendars

Welcome to the 2018 Christmas Papercraft-a-long, with this episode hosted by your favorite dolls, Samantha and Nellie!

This year, we're going with a vintag-y theme for decorations and cards.

Our living room has been decorated with card garlands and assorted paper sculptures, including an paper nativity scene from an antique french pattern.

The cards are miniature versions of Tasha Tudor's Christmas card designs.  For a bit of a Scandinavian influence, we have some miniature yule goats (No, we are not setting these on fire.  We are not allowed to set anything on fire.  The human has ruled that right out.) and a pair of Dala horse, all made from paper.

The kitchen is ready for some baking goodness.  We're planning a gingerbread house this year, along with peppermint bark and even more cookies.

And for today's papercraft:  Advent calendars!

The original designs are (as always) from Canon Creative Park.

We've shrunk these down to our size.

House Advent Calendar

House Calendar Instructions

Tree Advent Calendar

Tree Calendar Instructions

Print the calendars out on lightweight cardstock for best effect.  

The house is simpler to make than the tree.

We have 2 calendars, one shaped like a Christmas tree, and one shaped like a house.  Each calendar has 24 little drawers to pull out.  These two designs actually have interchangeable drawers, if anyone wants to mix-and-match.

We're just showing off the contents of the drawers...  The other girls aren't getting sneak peaks of the treats.

The giant stash of candy we have actually fits in the drawers quite well.

...and meet a different furry interloper.  This one wants to play with the candy.
Notice the devil-may-care look as she paws at the candy drawers.

Not that the normal furry interloper isn't around...

Countdown to Halloween: Lily's Candy Stash

Lily here.  I promise promise promise I didn't do anything to the candy.  Really.  I swear.  None of the candy went anywhere near my potions lab.  The owl can vouch for me.  It's been keeping a very close eye on all the goodies, and there are an awful lot of goodies.

We've got four major groups of candy right now:  the penny candy, the chocolate, the candy boxes, and the candy bars.

First off, the penny candy.  The jars came from Joann's, and are perfect for penny candy at a store.  The candy itself is actually oblong glass beads wrapped in paper.  They're maybe 1/2" long and a 1/4" in diameter.

We've got 4 sorts of bubble gum, tootsie rolls, and 5 flavors of fruit chews.  Gorgeous candy, but not the best to find in your trick-or-treat bag.

The chocolate is a much better haul.  We've got Hershey's (with a wrapper from 1908), Nestle Crunch (the wrapper dates to the 1950s), Kit Kat bars (1960s wrapper), and a pile of Hershey's mini chocolates in 4 varieties.

These are all made from rectangles of craft foam, first wrapped in a scrap of aluminum foil and then wrapped in the paper wrapper.  The little pumpkin gift box is the freebie for the day.  It's another Canon Creative papercraft design, shrunk down to doll size.  It holds quite a bit of candy too!

Pumpkin Gift Box

Instructions from the Canon Creative site

Next up:  a very large assortment of vintage candy boxes.  There's 25 designs in all, all sized to fit in a doll's hand.  They're all stuffed with seed beads to make a lovely rattling noise when you shake them and give them a realistic weight.

Do we have enough varieties?  I think we need more than 25 types of candy, don't you?  I really want some Atomic Fireballs.  Are we missing your favorite old-fashioned candy?  Let us know so we can remedy that oversight.

And finally, the chocolate bars.  The full size ones that you really want inside your trick-or-treat bucket.  The good stuff.  These are made from craft foam with a paper wrapper.

We went all vintage with these candy bars.  All the wrappers are from the 1930s and 1940s, depending on when the candy first came into production.  The human ended up doing quite a bit of research when she was looking for the vintage wrappers.

Did you know that the 'Three Musketeers' candy bar used to actually be 3 tiny candy bars in the same wrapper?  The three flavors were strawberry, vanilla, and chocolate, but during World War 2 and rationing, they cut the strawberry and vanilla bars and just left the chocolate one we still have today.

Eventually, eventually we will convince the human to make us Reese's peanut butter cups...maybe for Christmas...

Countdown to Halloween: Paper Sculptures

Nothing better than paper sculptures for home decor.  Or doll house decor.

It's Nora again, this time with our fanciest display pieces yet.  We wanted something a little fancier than just tiny pumpkins (though we have those too), so we pestered the human until she found just the right designs to make in miniature.

Fun fact:  lots of papercrafts weren't meant to be made at a smaller scale...  These three display pieces took the human about 3 days to finish.  We'll share the sources for these sculptures, and then remind our lovely readers that these are much much harder to make than the usual printables we give out.  '4-8 hours per sculpture, and you'll want to use tweezers' complicated.  The human thinks they're well worth the time, and since we get the decor, we think it's worth it too.

All of these were from Canon Creative Park.  (The human is not affiliated in any way with the company.  She just loves the free designs and shrinking them down for us.)  To shrink them down, go the layout settings when you're printing and select either 'print 2 pages to a sheet' or 'print 4 pages to a sheet'.

First off, the Halloween scene.  This has 5 individual characters (a witch, a cat, a ghost, a jack o' lantern, and a skeleton) on a house.  The characters are about 1" tall.  They were...complicated...  (The human later compared the characters to her Dungeons and Dragons miniatures.  They were the same size.  Certain language inappropriate for young ladies was used loudly at this discovery.)

The original from Canon Creative Park

Print this at 4 pages to a sheet for the size shown here.  

Use a lightweight cardstock.

Next up is our Halloween tree.  The trunk, branches, and base are made from cardstock.  The lanterns and bat are made from normal paper because cardstock is too heavy for the curves.  This is another design from Canon Creative.  There's 9 little lanterns, 4 pumpkins and 5 monster faces.

The Halloween Tree from Canon Creative Park

Print this at 4 pages to a sheet for the size shown here.  

And finally, our absolute favorite new toy (and the human's too):  Jack and the Halloween dancers!
The jack o'lantern top moves up and down and you can see all the little figures inside.  You move it by spinning the skull knob in the front.  How does it move?

The base has a complicated paper gear mechanism inside.  There's 6 vertical rods all linked together from front to back, each with a slightly different height and turning radius.  It's a rather neat little bit of paper engineering.

There is a ghost, a cat, a bat, a witch's hat, and a skull that move up and down inside the jack o'lantern.  Amazingly enough, we have yet to break it despite much manhandling of the turning mechanism.  (We were a little afraid we were going to break it before we had a chance to show it off, in all honesty...)  This is printed at 2 pages to a sheet, because the human was not willing to try to make paper gears quite that small.  This was also the 8 hours and lots of fiddly bits craft, but you didn't have plans for the weekend anyways, right?

Jack and the Halloween Dancers, from Canon Creative Park

Print this at 2 pages to a sheet, on cardstock

BOO!

Countdown to Halloween: Outfits and Activity Books

Nora here.  The human has been too busy to sew for us lately since she needed to get our candy and book stash under control.  When we asked her for new clothes, the human made some rather irritating noises about 'too many clothes' and 'not wearing perfectly good outfits you already own', so Cauth and I braved the depths of the storage closet for some festive clothing.

These were made in...Fall 2015, if memory serves.  The same time as the rest of the attack of the novelty Halloween fabrics.  The human has learned better since then, so we're not subject to such blinding combinations as much anymore.  (The shirts look just fine with jeans.  Novelty print capris, not so much...)

To go with the rest of our goodies, we also got some festive activity books.  At this point, we have quite a collection.  Space, Christmas, and now Halloween.  Maybe next year we'll add Valentine's Day, Easter, and the 4th of July to the list of holidays that we have activity books for.  These books contain free printables from Dover Samplers.  They're super quick and easy to make, 5 min or less for something cute to play with or give to a trick-or-treater.

Get your Halloween activity books here.

Instructions

Countdown to Halloween: the Candy and Book Store

And we are back for the remainder of 2018 after our usual summer break.  It's almost (10 days left) to Halloween, and we spent some time setting up Halloween decorations in our book store.  We'll be doing a bunch of posts leading up the big day, showing off all our seasonal decorations

But first, our store:

New books on the mantel, with Halloween paper sculptures

It's a bookstore with a rather fancy cafe/candy store attached.  The bookstore has a quite a few new decorations in the form of paper sculptures, and even more new books.  On the mantle are two fall-themed Tasha Tudor books:  Pumpkin Moonshine and Corgiville Fair.

The bulk of the books, vintage textbooks and modern YA fantasy

We also have a new collection of modern young adult fantasy books by Tamora Pierce, some steampunk books by Gail Carriger, and assorted other novels.  Have you lost track of what books we have?  So have we...

Another fancy paper sculpture, next to an antique globe from a yard sale

We've been collecting all sorts of cute things from going to garage sales this last year in Vermont.  The globe was a find from last fall.  But that's enough about the books.  We'll cover our new books in detail later.  Now for the glorious glorious candy store.

The owl is back to guarding the candy cart

Just having chocolate frogs isn't enough anymore.  We went all out in our candy collection this year.

We have the traditional candy, penny candy, chocolate bars, and all.  And then we have the Honeydukes cart (with owl) and display case.  For all of the candy.  Ever.

Pies, pumpkin pasties, cauldron cakes, madelines, and more...

Exploding bon bons, Bertie Botts Jelly beans, and butterfly wings

Some fancy premium chocolates with envelope wrappers

The final tally of Honeydukes cart and display is:  24 chocolate frogs (all with frogs inside), 12 boxes of sugared butterfly wings (6 with pretend candy, the rest stuffed with beads for weight), 4 boxes of cauldron cakes (each with a cake inside), 12 bags of peppermint toads (weighted with glass beads), 12 bags of fudge flies (more beads), 8 boxes of salt water taffy, 8 boxes of Drobble's bubble gum, 8 boxes of exploding bon-bons, 12 boxes of Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans, and 6 boxes of black pepper imps (all weighed with glass beads, but otherwise the packaging is sealed).  Oh, and 8 bars of Honeydukes branded chocolate (aluminum foil over craft foam, with a paper wrapper)

Want to guess how many individual pieces of candy are in this setup?

And that's just the Honeydukes portion of the shop.  We also have an old-fashioned candy store worth of penny candy, chocolate, and candy bars...  Pretty sure we're ready for all the trick-or-treaters that might stop by.

And if you managed to stick around this long, we have a treat for you: the Halloween banner we're using to decorate our concession stand.

The original banner can be found HERE.  (Yes, it's another papercraft from Canon Creative.  The human loves their designs, and they always shrink down well.)

The resized version for doll is HERE.

Stay tuned over the next week for all of our Halloween goodies!