Paper Christmas Village

How to make the houses

1. Print on card at 100%. Choose “Actual size” in the print dialog, then lay a ruler on the 50 mm bar at the foot of the sheet. 160 to 250 g/m² card (60 to 90 lb cover) folds crisply and stands up; ordinary 80 g/m² copy paper works for a first try but sags.
2. Cut out the windows and the door first, while the sheet is still flat, with a craft knife on a cutting mat. Then cut round the solid outline with scissors.
3. Score and fold every dashed line: run a dry ballpoint or a blunt knife along a ruler first and the folds come out straight, which matters most on the roof ridge.
4. Back the windows. Glue vellum, tracing paper or baking parchment behind the window holes from the inside. It spreads the light into a warm glow and hides the bulb.
5. Glue the walls. Put glue on the grey tab and press it behind the free edge of the first gable wall. Close the bottom like a gift box: dust flaps in, then tuck the long flap.
6. Fold the roof along the ridge and fold its rims down and the little corner flaps in. It lifts off, so you switch the light on and off without unfolding anything. Glue the chimney or the steeple onto the roof (the steeple's place is dotted on the church roof).

How to make the window strip

Choose Window and type the width of the glass, measured inside the frame; the strip prints that long, give or take a millimetre, on landscape sheets with a 10 cm check bar on each. For the cut-out, print on thin card (120 to 160 g/m² cuts cleanly with a craft knife), cut the windows first and the outline second, trim each sheet on its join ticks, butt join A to join A and tape the seams from the back. Glue yellow tissue or vellum behind the window holes, on the card and never on the window. Fix the strip to the glass with removable tape only: washi or painter’s masking tape along the snow band and up the tallest spire is enough, and it peels off in January without residue; glue, glue dots and double-sided tape leave a film that takes a scraper to remove. With a lamp on in the room, the windows glow yellow from the street after dark. For the stencil, tape the sheet to the glass printed side against it, trace from the other side with a liquid chalk marker, and wipe it off later with a damp cloth (try a corner first on frosted or coated glass). To draw on the inside of the pane with the sheet taped outside, tick Mirror: the sheets print reversed, so from the street the church stands where it stands on the unmirrored strip. There is no lettering in it, so unmirrored is not wrong, only reversed.

How to make the village set

Choose Village set for the things that stand between the houses: six fir trees in three heights (5, 6.8 and 9 cm at medium), four lamp posts with a lit lantern, three long and two short lengths of picket fence, a well and a sled, plus a snowy base with a road through it. Each piece stands on two feet cut from its bottom edge: fold the first foot forward and the next one back, and it stands on a footprint at least 40% as deep as it is tall, so a nudge to the table does not topple it. To join the fence, glue each length’s grey tab behind the first picket of the next; the pickets carry on at the same spacing, and bending the tab instead of gluing it flat turns a corner. Tick the buildings you are making and the base is sized to them, each floor drawn as a dashed footprint at true size with “front” on the road side, so every house stands where the plan put it: with all six at medium it is 29.3 × 16.8 cm, printed on two sheets. Trim each base sheet on its solid line, butt the half circles into whole circles (A to A), tape the seam from underneath, and glue the whole base to foam board or a shoebox lid if it has to be carried.

How to make the display: a backdrop and risers

Choose Display. The backdrop is a night sky with a crescent moon, stars, a far-off village with lit windows and two snowy hills, printed at the width and height you type: measure the shelf or mantel end to end, and how high you want the sky to rise behind the tallest roof (the church at medium stands 15.5 cm to the tip of its spire, so 35 to 45 cm looks right). It tiles across landscape sheets in a grid; trim each sheet on its corner ticks and butt the edges, letters to letters across and numbers to numbers down, then tape from behind. A 120 × 40 cm backdrop takes 15 A4 sheets, and the colour one is mostly navy ink, so check your cartridge first.

For a glowing sky, choose Black card, lit from behind: it prints a template instead. Clip each sheet over black card (a sheet of black A4 card for each, or one long piece of black mounting board), prick every small dot with a pin and every large one with a skewer or a 2 mm hole punch, cut out the moon and the little windows with a craft knife, and back the moon and windows with vellum. Hang a string of battery fairy lights 5 to 10 cm behind it, and the stars and windows light up in a dark room.

The risers are three fold-up steps, 2, 4 and 6 cm high at medium (1.5 to 4.5 cm small, 2.6 to 7.8 cm large), that lift the back row above the front: the tallest buildings go on the back step. Each step is 1 cm deeper than the deepest building on it, 5.7 to 6.5 cm deep at medium, with each building’s footprint dashed on its top so you know where it stands. Each is a tube (front, top, back, bottom and a glue tab); a step longer than the sheet comes as two tubes that butt together, and a tall one too big for the sheet comes in two L-shaped halves. They hold a paper house easily in thin cardboard: cut out the printed net, trace round it on the plain inside of a cereal box (the front of a large box, about 19 × 29 cm, takes the biggest piece), score the dashed lines with a ballpoint against a ruler, fold and glue. Then glue the white snow skirt over the front and the two open ends, drifts up: it hides the cereal-box print and rises up to 6 mm above the step like a snowbank.

Small space puts all six buildings in one row on one 2 cm riser (1.5 cm at small) for a windowsill or a narrow shelf: at small it is 46 cm long and 5.2 cm deep, at medium 57 × 6.5 cm, printed in tubes that butt end to end.

How to make the ornaments

Fold and glue each house with the house steps; this is what differs.

Choose the Ornament size and every building comes out about 5 cm tall to the ridge, in its own proportions (the cottage 4.5 cm long, the townhouse 2.2 cm wide and narrow), as a closed box with a glued-on roof. Print on 160 g/m² card (about 60 lb cover): each finished house then weighs 1 to 2 g, light enough for the tip of a branch; on 250 g/m² card it would weigh about half as much again. Before you glue anything, pierce the ring printed in the middle of the roof ridge with a needle; that hole is the house’s balance point. Pass 20 cm of thread up through it from inside, knot the end (or tie on a bead) under the ridge, then glue the walls, the floor and last the roof onto the grey tabs on the gables. The thread guide printed on the sheet shows the same steps.

How to make the advent village

Fold and glue each house with the house steps; this is what differs.

Choose Advent village for an advent calendar of 24 houses: cottages, townhouses, bakeries, shops and barns in different heights and roof colours for days 1 to 23, and the church with its steeple for day 24. Each house's front door carries its day number and is cut on three sides only, so it opens on its hinge; cut the door last, after the windows. Every house is at least 4 × 3 × 3 cm inside below the walls' top (the smallest is 4.1 × 3.3 × 3.1 cm, the townhouses stand 7 to 7.8 cm tall inside), enough for two wrapped chocolates, a hair tie, a folded coupon or a riddle; long things such as a candy cane or a lip balm do not fit. Fill each one through the roof, which lifts off: the lid's rims are 1.5 mm bigger than the walls, so it stays on without glue. Sheet 1 is the street map: two streets with houses on both sides, a lane, and the square where the church stands, drawn at scale with a 10 cm bar. Laid out with the road pieces from the last sheets the village takes 40 × 64 cm; on a narrow shelf, leave the roads out and keep the order. It is 24 sheets of A4 (23 of Letter) in all, so print on 250 g/m² card if your printer takes it. In the vintage glitter style the houses keep their glue zones and light holes but not the window-film pieces, to save card: back the windows with tracing paper instead.

How to make the vintage glitter houses

Fold and glue each house with the house steps; this is what differs.

Choose the Vintage glitter style for the 1950s look: each building prints in a pastel pair (a pink cottage with a mint roof, a powder-blue townhouse with a pink roof, a butter-yellow church with a blue roof, and so on), with white window frames, a little peaked hood over each square window and a flower box under it. The faint dotted boxes are the glue zones: the snowy half of each roof next to the ridge, and a snow line along the foot of every wall. Each stops 2.5 mm short of the folds, because glitter on a fold cracks off when you bend it. Glitter the flat sheet before you fold: spread newspaper, brush a thin, even coat of white PVA glue over one zone at a time, pour fine glitter on thickly, wait a minute, then tip the sheet up and tap the back so the loose glitter falls onto the newspaper; fold the paper in half and pour it back into the jar. Let it dry for an hour before folding. Craft glitter is plastic (usually PET film with a metal coat) and sheds for years. Mica flakes, sold as mica snow, are a mineral and give the soft old-fashioned sparkle; coarse salt or Epsom salt crystals look like frost but clump and soften the card in a damp room, so keep a salt village dry.

The sheets also carry window-film pieces: one for every window, 3 mm bigger than the hole on each side, the 3 mm being the glue margin. Lay cellophane, coloured acetate or vellum over them and cut round the solid line, or print that part straight onto vellum, then glue each piece inside the wall over its window. Yellow or amber cellophane gives the warm glow of the old houses.

The brush-tree base is a 3 cm snowy box: fold the sides down, glue the tabs, and push a bottle-brush tree’s wire trunk through the hole in the top and bend it flat underneath; for a tree on a wooden block, glue the block on top instead.

Each back wall has one dashed hole, at least 8 mm from every edge and fold, where you can push a single bulb of a battery fairy-light string through from behind; where the back windows leave no room (every small building, and the medium cottage and barn) it takes the place of one back window. Cut it only if you use one. Never a candle and never a mains bulb: LEDs barely get warm, card and glitter burn.