(This post is part of my Frosty Festivities 2015 Blog Event – see a list of all the posts HERE)
Hello! Today I’m sharing these lovely Christmas Village Candle Houses. I’ve called this a kids craft as my children made these, but I’m sure grown-ups will enjoy making them as well – I’m certainly tempted to make a few of my own!

I do want to point out straight away that these are for LED candles – the battery powered, flameless, kind. DO NOT put normal candles in these as you will start a fire – those roofs would burn up nicely.
That’s the safety message out of the way!
My kids had great fun making these and now they want to play with them, but I’m trying to keep them out of their reach so we can have them on display at Christmas. I know they will become a toy as soon as Christmas day has passed though, so you could always just make these as toy houses instead of candle ones. I just want to have a Christmas village to display this year!
If you want to make some of your own, here’s how to create them…
Step 1: Find some cardboard tubes, cut them to the size you want your houses to be, and make some initial holes for where the windows will be, to help you get your scissors in. I did all of this step before the kids came to the table, as I knew the card would be too tough for them to get their scissors through without a starting hole. I used a Big Shot to punch the initial holes:

You could also use a paper piercer or sharp scissors to make those first cuts, just be careful not to pierce your hands – you could put a lump of blue tack or playdoh at the back of the place where you are going to make the hole, to give you something to press onto.
Step 2: Call the kids in, if you are doing this with kids who can use scissors, and put them to work making the windows larger. I wasn’t expecting Cheeky Boy (age 4) to be able to do much, but he came up with an amazing star-shaped design, that obviously isn’t neat and tidy, but it let the light out and it’s all his own work. Look how much they were both concentrating:


Step 3: You can do this bit later, but I wanted to get it out of the way before we got messy, and I thought it might help with the next step – choose which papers you will use for your roofs:

Step 4: Start painting your houses. I thought we’d paint depending on what colour the roofs would be, but the kids found it more fun to paint what they wanted and then decide which roof would go on which house later. I let them go with the flow. Make sure you protect your work surface and wear aprons, if you want to. I did neither because our table is too covered in stains to worry about, and I couldn’t find the aprons! We used kids craft paint so it washes off easily anyway:

We painted most houses with one coat of paint, except white which needed 2 coats. Actually it probably needed 3 coats but the kids didn’t want to paint them again!
Step 5: While the paint is drying (which could take all night depending on your paint) you can prepare the roofs. Our circles were 10cm (4″) in diameter, I got the kids to draw around some Ikea cork coasters of that size, onto the back of the papers they’d chosen for their roofs:

Cheeky boy’s circles were way out. Below you can see one of his circles on the left, and one I’d helped him to correct on the right. At least he was having a go:

Step 6: Cut your circles out, then cut a piece-of-pie styled chunk out of them (it doesn’t need to be a certain measurement, just eye-ball it). Cheeky boy also can’t cut in circles. The blue one second from left was one he’d cut, and it was too small, so I re-cut a blue one for him, and a red one. The one on the bottom left, which looks white (but is green patterned paper on the other side) he’d managed to cut outside of the circle, in a very jagged way, so I left that one as it was. I cut the pie-pieces out for him after I took this photo too. Little Miss did it all herself, after I showed her an example of the pie-piece:

Step 7: To make the roofs into a cone shape, put adhesive on one edge of the pie-piece hole, then flip the roof over and put adhesive on the other edge of the pie-piece hole:

Step 8: Bend the roof into a wide cone shape and stick the edges down. There will be a bit sticking out as we didn’t measure the pie-piece hole:

Just trim off the excess using scissors:

Cheeky Boy put the adhesive on his roofs but I did the bending and sticking.
Once the houses are all dry…

Step 9: Stick the roofs on. I used a hot glue gun, just dotting a few blobs at the top of the house before pressing the roof on. Tacky glue would work too, but I wanted it to dry fast:

Step 10: Draw on some details. I actually left the room and went to do some housework while the kids did this bit, as if I’d stayed in the room I would have kept telling them to keep it neat and make it Christmassy, but really I wanted them to have fun and be creative. So I left them too it. Of course I did come back to find they’d got Sharpie pen marks on their clothes, but they had drawn some fabulous designs too:

Hopefully the Sharpie marks will come out after a few washes!
Step 11: The final step is to blob on some tacky glue, around the edges of the roofs, and the bases of the houses, or wherever you want, then tip on some white glitter. This is the step that makes them look like Christmas village houses. Then you just need to pop an LED candle inside, and sit back to admire the glow:

In the above photo you can also see how Cheeky Boy cut a door in one of his houses, when I wasn’t looking. It means you can see the candle inside, but not if you turn it around the other way!
Be Inspired:
Make a Christmas village house, or other Christmas decoration or embellishment, out of a cardboard tube
Cut or punch some star shapes
Tip white glitter on as a finishing touch to make a project wintry
Would you like to live in one of these cosy little houses?!
Remember that commenting on this post, and any post that goes live during November 2015, will count as another entry into the Grand Giveaway {NOW CLOSED}, but only if you’ve registered your interest in winning that prize right HERE!
I’ll be back tomorrow morning at 8am GMT!
Jennifer x