Miniature Christmas Glitter Houses

Around Christmas time I spend ages wandering around the garden centres admiring the pretty little village scenes that they have. I especially love the little merry-go-rounds and the ones with the families skating around on the pond. Sadly, these collections are all pretty expensive so I decided to attempt to make my own little scene using just card.

If you google ‘glitter houses’ or ‘paper houses’ you will find lots of free templates and instructions for making these and there are loads of cool images on Pinterest. (Have you guessed that I am a Pinterest addict?) They were originally called Putz houses so another search under this will also pull up lots of links.

These little houses and church cost me around £2 to make. I just had to purchase some nice thick card, I already had the glitter here anyway. For the little houses I used the Harvest Houses template from Victoria Magazine and the church template came from Little Glitter Houses. There is a huge amount of information on this website and loads of good tips to get you started. I’m not going to include a full tutorial on here as Little Glitter Houses show this much better than I can.

Just a few tips to get you started though.

1.  A few sites suggest using chip board for this. That sounded like far too much work for me so I just used some nice thick card and it worked very well.

2.  I found good old Prit stick worked best for gluing the different parts of the house together. A glue gun was too messy and PVA didn’t seem to work as well.

3.  I used a clear glue stick to cover the completed houses with glue prior to pouring the glitter over them.  The children helped with this and in hind-sight I wish I had supervised this more to get a little more glitter on the houses and less on the carpet! I might go back and add a bit more glitter in a day or two.

4.  I used fine, white glitter as recommended on most sites.

5.  I used an old cake board for the base and covered it in a couple of layers of fake snow. I saw this in a shop really cheap, I think it was about 75 p for a bag. We will probably put the rest of it in a tub and add some Playmobil people for some snow fun!

6.  Today I picked up some battery-powered tealights which fit inside the houses perfectly! The houses are going to look so sweet on the mantlepiece all lit up. They were only £1.50 for 4.

7.  You might want to invest in a decent craft knife for cutting out the houses. I was using an ancient old scalpel and it wasn’t really up to the job.  I did the cutting over an old chopping board to avoid any damage to the table.

8.  I would like to add some bottle brush christmas trees, preferably pink! These seem to be a bit of a pain to get hold of though so might have to wait until next year. In the meantime I made a little Christmas tree out of two tree templates. I cut a slit in the bottom of one template and a slit in the top of the other one to join them together so that the tree stands up.

9.  8.  Finally, this site contains no less than 124 useful links for paper houses. I haven’t manged to visit them all but the ones that I have are well worth a visit. There are some amazing ideas on here.

Christmas Tree Elves – easy christmas craft idea

I spotted these gorgeous little fellas on Pinterest and tracked them back to this  website which sells loads and loads of felt creations. They are all so gorgeous! Unfortunately it’s not an english website – I think it’s German but if you are clever with translations you might be able to place an order for delivery to the UK!

I thought I would attempt to make this myself. It doesn’t look nearly as good as the original but hey, that is part of the charm of making your own Christmas ornaments isn’t it? When the children are older and it is falling to pieces, at least I will be able to say ‘Mummy made that!’

Tutorial

These are so easy to make. My sewing skills are very limited so if I can make them anyone can!

I printed off a free Christmas tree template which I used to get the shape of the trees. Cut out two per tree. Sew around the outside of each tree leaving the bottom edge open.

Stuff your trees with a little material to give them some shape.

Cut a small slit where you want the face to go and from the inside push through a small polystyrene ball.

Finish sewing up the bottom edge but leave just enough space to insert a lollipop stick (you will use this to secure your elf to the log)

Sew on beads to decorate the trees and draw a face onto the polystyrene ball.

Add some little felt legs, again these are just two pieces of felt sewn together.

When you have made all your Elves, insert a lollipop stick into each one.

After ensuring that your log is fully dried (I left mine near the fire for a few days). Cover it with fine, white glitter.

Secure your Elves to the log by applying glue to the lollipop stick and pressing it onto the log. I used a hot glue gun for this, I don’t think PVA would be strong enough.

Easy peasy lemon squeezy… as my 3 year old would say.

What have you been making for Christmas? Please feel free to add your links here.

Autumn Indoor Fairy Garden

The autumn is probably not the best time to put together a fairy garden but I’ve been meaning to make one for so long I just had to bite the bullet and go for it!  This one is designed to be kept indoors, I will try to make another outdoor one next year. Please excuse the rubbish photos – I gave up waiting for a nice sunny day to take these.

I wasn’t really sure how to make the Fairy House but I knew I wanted it to look as natural as possible. In the end I decided to use an old tub of biscuits. I cut a door and some windows in it and then I used very thing strips of bark (which I peeled off our logs) to cover it with. I glued them on with my hot glue gun. I made a cardboard roof which I covered with lots of moss that we had collected from a walk in the woods. We made a doorbell with an acorn and a piece of string that you can just about make out on the side of the house.

When the house was finished I filled a tray with compost and planted up some ferns and other small plants. We put some gravel down and some shells and pebbles and soon had a path and patio area.  I sunk an old yoghurt pot into the soil to make a pond and Lily insisted that we gave it some sequin edging! This is just a basic garden to start us off but we are going to add to it over the coming months by making little bits and pieces for it. I will add more photos here as we do that.

If you are interested in making your own fairy garden you MUST check out these gorgeous pictures on Pinterest! I could sit and look at these all day…..

Update from Green Mummy

Sorry for the lack of posts lately. It’s all been a period of change for me and I’m still adjusting to exactly what it is I do now!

As of a few weeks ago, a lovely lady called Rosie took over my business for me and I am now officially a ‘stay at home mum’. OK, so I’ve been a SAHM since I had my daughter BUT now I do it without trying to run a business from my dining room at the same time.

I’m still adjusting to not having 101 things to do in one morning and I have to say I thought I would now have loads of time on my hands but I haven’t noticed any real difference yet.  I have, however got more quality time to spend with Thomas who is 3 and has spent most of his life having to fit in around my work, nappy demos and customers visiting our home.

I have missed this quality time.  We now have time to sit and read for ages, do puzzles, go for a walk in the woods, bake or just sit and play.  I’m going to make the most of this time while it lasts. Before too long at all he will be at school and everything will change again.

Green Mums Blog will still be here, at least for the near future. I hope you will still continue to follow my posts and enjoy reading about our adventures. It will be a slightly different blog now, there will be no more talk about cloth nappies I’m afraid… there will however, still be plenty of crafting, play, reviews and probably a fair bit of ranting!

The Very Hungry Cress Eating Caterpillar

Don’t these look great? These are very easy to make and you can find all the instructions in the wonderful book Garden Crafts for Children. We have made many things from this book but I think this is my favourite, it is so simple yet very effective. The children had so much fun making them and we are going to make some Three Cheese and Cress Muffins with our crop!

All you need to do is paint some egg cartons, fill them with half an egg-shell and then fill the egg shells with cotton wool. We dyed the egg shells pink which makes the caterpillars look even more colourful. Lily loved watching them turn pink as they sat in our bowl of water and food colouring. Just sprinkle the cress seeds onto the top of the cotton wool and keep them watered until they grow. We used pipe cleaners for the legs and stuck on a little smiley face.

A Playmobil Playground for Free!

What started off as a little tube slide (from a wrapping paper cardboard tube) soon developed into a full-blown fairy house and playground.  Before I knew it a couple of hours had gone by and nothing had been done since breakfast! Oh well, sometimes you’ve just got to go with the flow and forget about your to-do list.

We had loads of fun making this.  I used a sharp scalpel to cut out the windows and doors from the plastic cartons and acrylic paints to decorate.  I found PVA glue was the best to stick the sparkly flowers onto the bottles.

Rapunzel Tower and ladder using pipe cleaners

Perfect for playmobil people!

Enjoying a little swing on a sunny day…

No fairy house is complete without an enormous slide

I wrapped crepe paper over the top of the cartons and secured with string to create a roof for the houses. It also hides the opening of the cartons quite nicely.

 

The children both had lots of fun playing with this.  I have a feeling it is going to get lots of bits added to it as time goes on. Lily has already said she wants a see-saw and roundabout so I can see we are going to be busy working on this for some time.  They added a little tupperware pot to the bottom of the slide and filled it with water,  so it now resembles a water park!

Container grown vegetables – the results are in!

We have been enjoying the fruits of our labour the past few weeks! Last night we had a lovely meal and the only thing that didn’t come from our garden was the cold chicken!

In the spring, we purchased a small raised vegetable bed and excitedly filled it with beetroot, carrot and green bean seeds.  I am amazed by how productive it has been. We also had an old water-butt that had a leak in it so we cut that in half and hey-presto we had some fantastic containers for our potatoes. They tasted amazing and the children had great fun digging for them. Just look how pleased they are with their crop!

Lily and Thomas are now expert pea shellers! If you haven’t tried this with children you really should give it a go. It keeps them amazingly quiet! I couldn’t think of any songs about peas but we managed to make up a few funny ones of our own whilst we were doing this.  Lily LOVED eating the peas raw straight from their shells and it really took me back to my childhood when I used to sit at my grannys table helping her to shell the peas.

We’ve also been growing Tomatoes in grow bags and Courgettes and Peas in pots. Despite the growing season being very wet for us here in Devon, everything has done really well and we will definitely be growing our own next year.  I think the most successful thing for us was the runner beans.  We planted these in a half barrel that we picked up at the garden centre a few years back. We lined it with an old compost bag before planting so that it would retain some of the moisture and it worked really well. We were picking runner beans non stop for about a week before growth started to slow down.

The one thing we didn’t have much luck with was Strawberries.  I think this was just due to the amount of rain that we had, they were all mushy inside and very watery.

If you are growing beetroot this year you might want to try this little recipe which I cooked up the other night! It is really yummy and I found it a great way to use up green beans and beetroot (which we seem to have a glut of at the moment!)

Beetroot and Green Beans with Garlic.

Boil your green beans for around 7 minutes.

Heat some olive oil in a pan and add the green beans and your (pre-boiled) beetroot.

Add a clove or two of fresh garlic and some salt and pepper.

Fry for about 5 minutes tossing the garlic and vegetables around and making sure the garlic does not burn.

Serve it hot or cold, it is very tasty either way!

Seared Green Beans and Beetroot with Garlic

Have you been growing fruit and vegetables this year?  Do you have any tips for container vegetable growing?