3D Christmas Village

Here's a quick peak at the growing Christmas village I've been building using many different SVGCuts.com kits.  I built some of these last year and just got around to embellishing them this year. Others were built over the past few months and are still works in progress.  Most of them sit on a black bookshelf, so the photos aren't the greatest. 

I have so much fun picking out the papers and thinking of ways to make these unique.  And the more I look at the same kits done by others, I get even more wonderful ideas and inspiration.  

I hope you enjoy this photo gallery of Christmas Cove, a coastal village of my own imagination which is a very merry place to live!

 

I added some icicles to "Flurry Chapel," aka the Silent Night church.

 

Got bling? I went a little crazy adding sparkle and shine to this gingerbread house from the Happy Holidays kit.

This is the 3D Snowy House from the Winter's Chill kit.  I added a 1" miniaturized wreath from the Silent Night kit. Thank goodness for fork bows, because there was no other way I would have been able to tie one that small! I also added some coach lights from the Enchanted Autumn Pumpkin Carriage. 

I used one of the snowflakes from the Winter Gazebo kit and fashioned a weathervane of sorts to go on top of the gazebo. The pine garland is Pine Twine from Tim Holtz. I keep meaning to add some shadow figures to this so they show through when it's lit up. Maybe next year!  

This is Maple Manor all decked out for Christmas. I added a widow's walk to the top as I grew up in New England and remember seeing so many beautiful historic homes along the coast with them on the roof.  I added some sidelights around the front door and made a wreath from Tim Holtz Boxwood twine and jingle brads.  I never got around to adding a fence and some other details to this project, so I guess I'll be decking this one out next year as well.

Last but certainly not least, here's Candy Cane light (from the Seaside kit) along with the Christmas Tree from Santa's Surprises. So much more I want to do to further embellish these too, all I need is time!

Thanks for joining me on this short tour through Christmas Cove.  Happy Holidays!

Piano Box Card

I decided to add a few Christmas touches to the SVGCuts.com Piano Box Card from the Summer Box Cards kit.

Instead of using the flowers that came in the kit, I miniaturized some poinsettias from the wreath in the Santa's Surprises kit which is also from SVGCuts.

I even found a teeny tiny snippet of Silent Night sheet music in my Tim Holtz stash that I added. Love it! I'm so pleased with how this turned out. 

Thanks for stopping by!

Disney Explosion Box

At the request of a good friend, I set out to create a spectacular Disney-themed explosion box for her to use when gifting some theme park passes this Christmas.

 

I neglected to take pictures of a lot of things along the way, and these are by no means detailed instructions, but here' the basic gist of it:

I started out my box using the SVGCuts.com Small Snowflake Box from the Winter Gazebo kit. To turn it into an explosion box, I cut the pieces called 'bottom sides' into 6 panels. I left the tabs at the bottom for gluing, but the panel on the right has a side tab that is not needed, so I cut it off as well. When all was done, I had six panels that looked like this:

Next I cut out the pieces called 'bottom' - two hexagons - and set about gluing my 6 panels to the largest bottom piece, one on each of the six sides.. I used the leftover hexagon bottom to cover up the glued tabs and finish it off neatly.

I used my Cricut Disney cartridge to cut out the various characters and decorated the panels with an embossed background, the characters and some bling to weight down the flaps.  Mickey and Minnie are mounted on some acetate strips, so they move around and look like they're really jumping for joy! The flap with Mickey's hand is a pull-out pocket where I added a message about going to Disney.

I added a sliceform tree that I found a pattern for online. It required a lot of tweaking, but I got it to work out for me. I stuck it on a doily 'tree skirt' with some hot glue and added some mini presents to finish off the inside.

For the exterior, I created some decorative panels in red to go around the outside panels and added white ovals to the two front panels to look like Mickey's pants buttons.

I made the plain box lid (in the extras folder) and decorated it with some festive greenery (from a Cricut cartridge) on the outside and then hid a little surprise for one of the recipients (also a Star Wars fan) on the inside of the lid.

The idea for the Mickey ears came from Sharalyn Morgan's blog post called Minnie Ears for Crystal. 

I used the SVGCuts.com Baseball Cap file from the Fun and Games kit to get this started.  I made my ears slightly different than Sharalyns in that I omitted the bow, put the ears in different placement due to how I wanted the box to face, and then I glittered the ears themselves and then sealed them with some Mod Podge so the glitter wouldn't get all over EVERYTHING!

Once the ears were all put together, I glued the baseball cap top (with ears) to the baseball cap base with some hot glue around the inside of the box.  The ears are what is going to be used to open the explosion box, so I needed it to stay together.

After the baseball cap/ears box was one glued unit, I then glued that to the top of the snowflake box lid:

 to get this:

Clear as mud, right?!!  Anyway, I think you get the idea. All you do now is lift up on the ears and the box 'explodes' open.

I'm told this project was a huge hit Christmas morning and I'm so very glad. It was a fun challenge to create this and come up with different ideas for how to make it special.

Thanks for stopping by!