MAKE YOUR OWN CHRISTMAS CRACKERS

Christmas gatherings are the trending topic these days. Prepare all your festive food but leave a space for your DIY creations. What about handmade Christmas crackers?

Here is  a tutorial to make them, just a few guidelines, your imagination will do the rest! ;)

First of all what we need is:

- Tissue paper

- Three empty toilet rolls

- Confetti

- Balloons

- Sweets

- Washi tapes

- Christmas felt pendants

- Buttons

- Thin hemp cord

 Take the three empty toilet rolls and place them in a row on the centre of the tissue paper and roll them around it.

Just pull out one toilet roll, just a little to leave a gap between the two empty toilet rolls. Twist the tissue paper and push it in.

 
 Take a piece of thin hemp cord and tight up your Christmas cracker. Then, remove the toilet roll and put your mini-gifts inside. Here is where your creativity wakes up. Depends on the addressee, the stuff into the cracker will be different. But if you don’t know what the addressee likes, it’d better put some party items into it (a paper hat or crown or handwriting jokes) or if you want to sweeten your dinner choose some sweets: chocolate coins, lollipops…

Do exactly the same at the other side. And that’s all! Easy and quick! You have no excuse not to have your Christmas crackers on your plate in your Christmas dinners. Decoration is up to you... We chose washi tapes and Christmas felt pendants! What is your choice?

Ta-daaaaaah!!! 

WOOL IS COOL

In winter we need to wrap us up because it’s cold. Then, why we don’t wrap our ‘gifts' up?

We don’t want them to catch a cold. That’s why we decided to buy a wool skein from Katia to make them warmer.

Take the wool and use it as a ribbon. It gives them a wintry look, ideal for your Christmas gifts.

You can gather a small amount together in a corner, it will look like a cool wide ribbon. 

Or just tie the wool as a bow or hang it as a pendant. As you can see in the pictures the options are varied and a lot.

Or combine it with a jingle pendant or a little Christmas ball hanging on your Christmas packaging.

Or just forget about our tips and create a new way to use the wool on your gift-wraps. Remember, this winter Wool is Cool, just let them wrap your presents. There are lots of types of it: different colours, -even there are yarns which mix colours- sizes, and with trendy details. We discovered a new world of wool which was unknown for us. We chose the degradé one in grey.

Or if your Christmas presents are already gift-wrapped, another wool use might be just for decorating. Wrap whatever you want, we chose to cover our star-shape box with wool in a disorganised way.

What’s your name? Mary? Take one of our letters, the ‘M’ in this case, and wrap it up with wool. So, you can change the wool colour depending on your mood. It’s winter, why not in grey? It’s Christmas, maybe in red? St. Patrick’s day… Do you guess the colour?

 If you want to get our cardboard letters for free don't forget to participate in our Boxing Day Competition! Good luck! ;)

CHRISTMAS MARKETS WE LOVE

We’ve just landed from London! If you want to inspire yourself and be surrounded by the Christmas spirit what a better place in Europe: London. That’s our first stop, we’ll be glad to visit more Christmas Markets all around the old continent. Let’s start our tour.

This weekend in London, in Brixton, it was held one of these Christmas events. Good music, warm welcome and a lot of lovely handmade objects. Between knitting and designing we spent a great time. We hope to visit London again and if it coincides with Crafty Fox Market, much better, we’ll go there for sure. We bought some of our Christmas gifts for our Secret Santa at the office.

But London has a compulsory stop at Christmas: Winter Wonderland. For whom doesn’t know it, it’s a Christmas fair you can find in Hyde Park, plenty of Christmas rides, food and crafts stalls, and of course, lights, mulled wine, Santas, ice ring, reindeers and Christmas carols playing everywhere.

We spent a wonderful time there, meeting craftsmen and craftswomen or experienced marzipan, cupcake and cookie bakers.

We brought the Christmas magic back to Spain, where our headquarters are, to spare it around our office and to inspire our studio staff to make and customize our littleboxes much better.

ROCKIN’ AROUND THE CHRISTMAS TREE…

Sick and tired of the traditional Christmas tree? Make it one by yourself. Handmade gives us a lot of possibilities to make our customized Christmas tree.

We’ll give you some ideas to decorate and make your Christmas tree.

Is everything ready? let’s go then…

We chose cardboard to decorate it, cheap and easy to get. And we drew a star on it, to put up on top of the Christmas tree. Stars, angels, Santa’s silhouette… what is the most important for you?

Colour sprays will make the rest for you. We didn’t want to take risks and we chose the white one. But we added a touch of magic glitter on it. Translation: metallic paint.

Let’s match it with our snowy Christmas tree. We know, it’s in brown colour, don’t panic, let’s make it nicer. Grab your single hole punch and start making holes following the shape of the tree.

We decided to take advantage of the colour spray in white which has been already used.

And do you guess what’s the purpose of the holes that we did before? We accept bets.

Our suggestion? Pass wool threat through the holes. We picked the white one, we want to make our Christmas tree as white as possible. Maybe it’s because we are not very used to seeing snowing in our country. At least, let’s pretend to have a snowy Christmas tree.

And that's the result!!

If you’re a busy person, which means less time to make or buy your Christmas decorations, we have another alternative for you.

Gold laces and jingle pendants, that’s all you need!

But if you are the contrary case, you like spending lot of time making your Christmas decorations, everybody here has his/her Christmas tree.

Paper prints are very useful in this case. Take the paper prints and paste a different one on every Christmas tree layer. Match them however you want, strips and dots, same or different colours, cut some stars, a snowy background… You notice that one of our favourite colours is blue, don’t you?

And you know the song, once we have your Christmas tree… Later we’ll have some pumpkin pie and we’ll do some carolling.

XMAS GIFTS, XMAS TREES, XMAS IS TIME TO PLEASE

Looking for Christmas inspiration? No worries SelfPackaging is here to help you.

Because we adore handmade, we suggest you some ideas to make your ‘packagings’ look nicer with no need to spend money.

Search in your old cupboard things to put on the box. We went to our grandma’s home and we came across a box plenty of spare buttons. Pick and paste some of them on the gift box to decorate it. We form a Christmas tree with them. And do you know who’s going to be the final owner of this cute box? Why not the person who offered her material to decorate it? Make your grandma happy! Christmas is family time! ;)

Or maybe these spare lace edgings that once she used to make curtains… Everything is valuable! Just trust on your imagination.

We’re sick and tired to see the same Christmas colours… red, white, gold, silver, green… Enough is enough… Let’s innovate! We took light blue to say ‘I love you’ or 'how special and magic is the person you love’ at Christmas! Which colour would you like to pick?

OK, we know some of you are not ‘blue supporters’ at Christmas! For the ones that prefer Santa’s colours, we suggest you some of our jingle pendants to give a touch of Christmas magic.

At last but not least, we propose you an original decoration. Take advantage of these colour sprays that once you bought for something that you barely remember. Cut cardboard stars and paint them with colour sprays, we chose white, matching with a lace edgings serigraphy.

Looking forward to receiving your ideas!! Happy early Christmas! In two days we’re in December. Have you made your DIY advent calendar?