Green Christmas Crafts | 25 Crafts of Christmas

We’re trying to be a little more environmentally conscious at Tindalls and therefore have been looking at DIYs that use some recycled or environmentally friendly materials.

Using these materials you already have lying about the house in conjunction with a few paints you can create some unique and special DIYs.

Although this blog is focusing on Christmas DIYs, all of the below can be customised to be used all year round for birthdays or other occasions.

1. Potato Stamps

A super simple, inexpensive and easy way to decorate cards, wrapping paper and even things like paper table cloths are potato stamps.

You will need:

  1. A potato
  2. A knife
  3. Acrylic/Poster Paint
  4. A brush
  5. A surface to stamp onto (wrapping paper, tissue paper etc)

How to Make

  1. Cut your potato so you have a flat surface to carve into. Choose a design (you could print out an image from the computer and use this to trace around).
  2. Once you’ve carved your potato, dry it off with a tissue. Then using a brush, paint a layer of acrylic paint onto the stamp and stamp away!
  3. We stamped onto tissue paper and kraft roll and we found the kraft roll was a little slippy so the stamp worked better and clearer on the tissue paper.

2. Glass Jar Tealight Holder

Glass Jar Tealight Holder

You will need:

  1. A Glass Jar
  2. Posca Pens (optional acrylic paint)
  3. Tealight

How to Make

  1. Using Posca pens is the easiest way to decorate your jar but using paint and a brush would work just as well! We used a Black PC-3M Posca Pen to sketch out some trees and Father Christmas on his sleigh with a reindeer. If you wanted to add some colour, Posca pens come in a huge variety of thicknesses and colours so any design is possible.

Tindalls Top Tip: For those of you who may not feel confident hand drawing an image, why not try printing the picture off first and inserting it into the jar to trace it. The best thing about Posca pens is that if you make a mistake, you can simply use a wet cloth to wipe it off again. If you wish to make your design permanent, you must bake the jar in the oven.

2. Poscas work brilliantly on most surfaces, you can even decorate mugs and plates with them which would make fantastic gifts!

3. Kraft Roll Wrapping Paper

You will need:

  1. Kraft Roll
  2. Pens (any kind)
  3. Acrylic or Poster paint
  4. Stamps
  5. Ink Pads
  6. Brushes
  7. String

How to Make

  1. Kraft Roll is really fantastic because you can completely personalise the design and it is also recyclable as a lot of wrapping paper isn’t. You can stamp onto it using rubber stamps, lino, potato stamps or even your fingers with either acrylic paint or stamp ink pads. We wrote the word ‘Merry Christmas’ over and over in different fonts as one of our designs using a Posca pen.

2. You can make really sweet penguin wrapping paper by covering your finger in black paint and stamping, then again with white paint, overlapping it slightly on the black. To finish off, we used an orange and a white Posca Pen for the eyes, beak and feet. You can also make reindeer with a brown finger print and then adding in the facial features and some antlers with Posca pens.

3. Adding string (either coloured or plain) adds a little extra touch to the gift wrap.


4. DIY Tags

You will need:

  1. Card (any colour)
  2. Glue
  3. Scissors
  4. Old magazines/Newspaper
  5. Fabric
  6. Washi Tape
  7. Ribbon

How to Make

  1. Start off by sketching out your tag. We sketched it out onto a piece of scrap paper so we could trace the same design onto several tags. We chose red and brown Kraft card and then using pages ripped out of a magazine, cut out some Christmas tree shapes to stick down.

2. We also used Washi tape and ribbon to decorate the tags. They are so customisable so if you have any bits of scrap fabric, paper etc you could use those to decorate them. Paint and pens would work well too.


5. Wine Bottle Candle Holders

You will need:

Empty wine bottle

Acrylic paint or Posca pens

Brush

Dinner Candle

How to Make

  1. Using acrylic paint, we coated the inside of the bottle to make it opaque. Then we painted a mixture of blues, purples and black paint on the outside to make a dark sky. We added gold stars with acrylic paint and then the outline of a cityscape. Adding white, purples and blues around the buildings gave off a misty winter night vibe. The windows were added last with gold acrylic.
  2. Add your candle into the top and light.
  3. Like all of the above DIYS you can really make this your own. The design is completely up to you and using the materials listed above you can create a wealth of different designs.