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...

Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween!

Halloween storytime at the bookstore

And this is what happens when the human finally lets us loose in the book-and-candy store.

There's storytime an cookies.

And coloring on the floor.

Or just catching up with friends about the latest books.

Candy and afternoon tea in the sweet shop

There's a place for tea for two.

Or just filling up the candy box

At the end of the night, it's time to see what's in the final haul

The owl is here to supervise.

Someone did in fact hand out apples to go with all that sugar.

But there is more than enough candy to go around.

Even if there's a furry candy thief lurking and waiting to pounce.

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!