I had a lot of fun making this cardboard Christmas village for one of the bulletin boards in the children's area of the local library.
This is a Martha Stewart's project and you can find the templates here. As you can see I changed mine slightly by leaving out the church and by not cutting out the windows on the houses.
This is how I made mine if you'd like to give it a go. The 1st step is to download the templates and to trace them on to cardboard. I used a couple of mailing cardboard boxes and traced the outlines of both templates on the inside of the boxes.
When tracing the trees make sure you do it so some of the tabs on the box can be used as a base to attach to the back of the houses later on. This helps create that 3D effect.
Cut out the trees and the houses and then using a thick permanent black marker draw the outline on both pieces.
The snow effect is embossed. I used 2 different embossing powders (seafoam white + bridal embossing tinsel) and melted them with an embossing heat gun. If you've never heat embossed before there are lots of tutorials online that tell you how to do it. This is a really fun and easy technique although a little messy but the results are worth it.
Now you can join both pieces to create your Christmas village.
Cut 4 thick brackets out of cardboard and fold in half.
Glue these tabs to the trees background as shown below. It's best to do this with a glue gun so you don't have to wait for the glue to dry.
Now glue the houses to these tabs making sure the bottom part of both pieces is aligned.
Cut 4 thin cardboard brackets and fold like so.
These will help keep your cardboard village stable; they are glued to the inside of the village as you see below and they should be out of sight.
Your cardboard village is now finished and should be stable enough to stand on its own.
I used mine to decorate a bulletin board.
All the elements on this board were handmade. The letters were also cut from cardboard, painted red, outlined with a thick black marker and the snow effect was heat embossed just like the snow effect on the houses and trees.
Have you started decorating for Christmas?
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