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: 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!

Science Fun (part 1)

It's not every day that the human gets a day off from work, and definitely not every day that the science lab is set up for business.  And, if you haven't met me yet (don't worry, the human has been really really slow about introducing me to the world), I'm Vega.  Jaime Luciana Vega.

And we (meaning Shep, myself, and the human), have been planning space adventures.  Hence Shep's new stash of space toys, and my stash of activity books.  Now for the human to get logistics under control.  Maybe start the Space Tourism Bureau?

I'm not the only new inhabitant of (well, I want to call it the SR2 Normandy.  Raise your hand if you get the reference), but I'll go with 'The Presidium' because it sounds better than 'The Madhouse with a giant cat'.  Meet Liz, the lizard, current perching on Nora.  Next thing you know, there'll be an octopus in the neighborhood.

My new activity books are mostly made from official NASA printables, shrunk down to 1/3 scale.  All except the 'My First Outer Space' coloring book.  That one was made from Dover free samples.  We've got a nifty little 'Space Tech' activity pad, and a little 'What we need to colonize Mars' activity book.  And then we've got some color books on the latest and greatest NASA gear:  the Space Launch System and ORION.

Doll Sized:

Outer Space coloring book

NASA activity books and Assembly instructions

Orion and Space Launch System coloring books

Human Sized:

NASA Space Tech Fun Pad

NASA Surviving and Thriving on Mars

and other coloring books from NASA

Yuletide Greetings

Thank you for understanding the small delay in our holiday plans.  But we're back now with some last minute presents and gift boxes.  Because everyone needs fancy boxes to store presents.  And cookies.  The round boxes make wonderful cookie boxes.

Cookie Swap!

 The designs for the boxes are plain, and are meant to be printed out on fancy cardstock.  The human had several packages of winter/holiday themed cardstock left over from last year that were perfect for this.  To get mix-and-match lids and boxes, print the same box on two different coordinating cardstocks and just swap the lids.

Get the box designs here.

The instructions are from http://www.auntannie.com/BoxesBags/OvalBox/.  There's all sorts of cute boxes, most of which don't even need to be resized for miniatures.

And what did we store in the rest of the paper boxes?

Yes, those are Pleasant Company reproductions

Vintage and antique paper dolls.  Lots of them.  

Dating from the 1830s all the way to the 1940s.

Get the Pleasant Co. paper dolls for Samantha, Kirsten, and Molly

But going a bit back in history:  the first paper dolls were elaborately hand painted, not printed.  Paper dolls certainly weren't cheap toys, but rather expensive treasures.  The box on the left is a reproduction of a set of a French paper doll and her wardrobe from the 1830s.  The doll was double sided, as were all of her clothes and hairstyles.  This was so fashion designers and home dressmakers could see both sides of the dress should they choose to make it for themselves. 

Get the 1830s French paper doll and the box.

This was rescaled from a set of paper dolls at ufdc.org.

 'But there aren't any paper tabs to put the clothes on the doll!'  That's right.  Back in the dark ages (not quite, but close), you put clothes on paper dolls with tiny dabs of sealing wax or pins.  Tabs on paper doll outfits didn't happen until McLoughlin Brothers invented them in the 1880s or thereabouts.  You're going to hear a lot about the McLoughlin Brothers, because these were also the people who took advantage of chromolithgraphy (one of the first color printing techniques) to mass produce paper toys for children.  They're the ones who produced the original paper doll on the right.  The original dates to 1865.

Get the Civil War paper doll
This was rescaled from a set of paper dolls at ufdc.org.

The McLoughlin Bros. were known for their children's books, games, and paper dolls in the late 1800s.  We also managed to acquire a small collection of those.  First some 'themed' paper dolls:  Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes, Fairy Tales, and Little Women.  Each of these sheets has a doll and 4-5 outfits of characters.  There's also three sheets of more generic dolls, each with 3 outfits (with hats).

Ge the McLoughlin Bros. Victorian paper dolls

We hope you have a happy holiday season and a joyous Yule.