The Christmas Craft Collective: Papercut Church Tutorial

I wasn't quite sure what kind of tutorial I would do today... last night I had it in my head that I would do a tea cosy, but I will do that another day- today my time just expired, and I really wanted to make another papercut church to replace the one I made last year (I felt it was out of proportion to the rest of the houses I had made) and also I wanted to make "stained glass" windows to put into it.

So, I decided to do a tutorial today, for the ninth of December, of a Papercut church. There are photographs at the end of this post that you could print out onto A4 card and use as instructed below.

Materials:

Clear plastic (I used a see-through sheet of printable clear film and painted on the "matte" side)

Paint (I use watercolour dyes from here)

Glue (I use my (*wonderful*) glue gun)

Craft Knife for cutting out the church model

Cardboard for the church model (I used A4 size contruction card in a dark maroon- which was all I had at the time! But works beautifully)

The How To:

Cut out your model using a craft knife.

Paint panels of colour using dots of paint on the clear film

Cut rectangles of coloured film, measuring larger than the window

Glue around the window and stick down the film (if there is a shiny and matte side, have the shiny side facing out)

Assemble the church, with pieces of tape (I use sellotape so that I can carefully peel it off at the end of the Christmas season and store it flat for another year)

I put some battery operated candles inside (I know I don't need to tell you NOT to put in real candles!!)

For aesthetic purposes, I set it up a vignette with some of the cut-out trees behind-

how pretty is that?

These are the templates for your church- photocopy the photographs onto A4 card and cut them out with a craft knife (or photocopy onto paper, draw around them onto card and then cut out)