Winter Village DIY

Although I usually spend my time sewing or baking, I actually really love sitting down to do some good old-fashioned paper crafting. There’s something very relaxing about it. After dressing up our mantle with the new fur and flannel stockings, I wanted to add some woodland glimmer to the rest of our family room. I spent the good part of a day combining paper and glitter and snow and glue to make a great winter village! I’ll show you how I made mine if you’d like to make one, too!

Supplies:

heavy patterned cardstock – choose paper with small print so that it shows on the tiny buildings!
glitter cardstock
vellum
Cricut cutting machine
Winter Wonderland Cricut cartridge
Cricut Scoring tool (or bone folder)
ruler
craft snow/
white glue or hot glue
glass dome
miniature trees and/or animals
flameless LED tea lights

(all supplies are available at Jo-Ann)

Begin by finding the desired size and shape of buildings that will fit under your dome. Using the Winter Wonderland Cricut cartridge or online software, select the desired shape. Use scrap cardstock and your Cricut machine to cut a few sizes and quickly assemble just the basic structure. Once you have the correct scale for your village, cut the buildings from patterned cardstock. I cut one set from patterned cardstock and one from glitter cardstock for each building shape (church, house A, house B, etc.)  This way, I could mix and match patterned houses with glittered roofs and vice versa. Other details were cut from a third sheet of cardstock. Cut the inner piece (this is the same shape as the main building, but without windows) from vellum so that you can “light up” the windows with a flameless candle.

Once your pieces are all cut, use a scoring tool (the pointy tip Cricut scoring tool works really well for this even though the cartridge is older so the machine can’t do the scoring for you.) and a ruler to score along the lines that the machine notches for you. Fold along all the scored lines.

Use white glue or hot glue to assemble the parts of each structure. Glue them together to form the buildings.

You can add little accents to the buildings, too, like a tiny bell (mine isn’t exactly the right shape for a church bell, but it works fine!) or a wreath, etc.

Add snow along some of the roof lines by adding glue and sprinkling on the snow material in small sections. Alternately, you could add snow to the entire roof.

If you’ve used vellum for the inner structure pieces, you can place a flameless LED tea light under the structure for a warm glow throughout your village!

Now, place your buildings on a bed of snow atop pedestals or pretty glass dishes and cover them with glass domes to keep the snow flurries at bay and add to the charm!

Have fun building your own gorgeous winter wonderland village!