Christmas Decorations part 3

Regular readers will remember (maybe) that we made a playhouse out of a large cardboard box a few months ago, and this week we've decided to make it part of our Christmas decorations.  Although this is an enormous cardboard house, I don't see why it couldn't be adapted to work just as well with smaller cereal box houses.

The finished Christmassed house

 The first thing we did was to make a wreath to hang on the front door.  I did have trouble taking this picture since our kittens keep pulling it off the door and fighting over it, but I managed to get it hung up for long enough to at least get this picture.  All this is is a few pipe cleaners twisted together, with green strips of paper wrapped around and a few blobs of red glitter glue.

Then we spent some time sticking gems on around the top of the house like coloured lights (sort of).  I drew a stringy lights shape around the top with chalk to stick them on so that they didn't end up all over the place.

I bought a couple of rolls of cotton wool to cover the roof and bottom of the window panes for snow.  Once it had been stretched out to stick down we didn't actually need as much as I had feared.

Make sure you buy cotton wool rolls, not balls, otherwise you'll be there all year and it will cost you a fortune!

We put some snow on the top of the chimney and cut some boots out of a sheet of black plastic from a cake packaging and glued them in the top.

 Then we decided that if Santa was on his way down the chimney,  his sleigh and reindeer should be nearby waiting for him.

Only four reindeer since there was limited space on the top of the house

The sleigh was made from a sheet of polystyrene from some packaging (I seriously never throw packaging away, you never know when it might come in useful!) decorated with glitter glue, then slotted together to hold it up.

I'm not 100% sure where Santa is going to sit, but I guess that's the least of his problems all the time he's stuck in the chimney with his boots in the air!!

The reindeers were made out of toilet roll middles (I know some people are concerned about the hygiene aspect of using them, so I guess kitchen roll middles cut in half would work just as well).
We stuck some googly eyes on the sides, cut out some antlers from some gold card and attached cardboard legs by poking them through slits cut in the sides of the roll and folding the ends over to hold them in place.  Then we used a big red pompom stuck to the front of one of them for Rudolph.