It's no secret that I recently made two felt Christmas trees for my girls to decorate. Not long after I mused out loud, "what about a gingerbread house?" and two little faces looked up and all but licked their lips. "Not ginger-bread gingerbread," I laughed, "felt."Using the same approach as last time, I made a card template, traced the shape onto an A4 piece of yellow felt and cut it out (brown or orange would have been better, but for some reason I had none of those shades and lots of yellow).
I also used a craft knife to cut a door and two windows (which are not so apparent in the picture I just realised). The door had two cuts; one long one up and a short one across. The windows were three cuts; up and a top and bottom cut, so that you can swing them open. If you don't have a craft knife, use a small pair of nail-scissors to snip a hole at one of the window or doors 'corners' and then poke your scissors through and cut.
The only additional pieces I made to decorate the house, were some slabs of felt-faux-frosting/snow, a couple of orange gingerbread people, and a moon. The other decorations; squares, rectangles, and ornament/flames all still worked fine as you can see by the "house-on-fire" design Mimi made above! The girls now make whole scenes which stretch across the carpet, with a house between two trees, all decorated to the billy-ho-ho-ho.
Don't have felt? Don't worry. You could do the same craft project with your kids using coloured paper. Help pre-cut the big pieces (trees and houses) and then let your youngsters assemble a variety of shapes in different colours to stick on top, in a way not dissimilar to the Christmas Tree Cards I recently made, I think little decorated gingerbread houses could be fun Christmas Card designs for next year. But you don't have to wait til Christmas - gingerbread houses would be a 'sweet' party craft and cardboard trees decorated with paper fruit, bird stickers, fabric flowers or buttons would make a great wet-weather activity. Enjoy. Speaking of trees - go vote for what materials makes the best Xmas tree over there ->
