Making Christmas decorations: Instructions for a gingerbread house garland made of cardboard

I'm already in the starting blocks for the Advent season and can hardly wait to decorate my home in a really cozy and Christmassy way.

Instead of spending a lot of money on new decorations, I would rather make some things myself this year. Not only is it a lot of fun - it's also a great activity to do with friends or family over a cupor cocoa – but also looks much more individual. Like this nostalgic cardboard gingerbread house garland.

Also read:

Gingerbread and gingerbread houses are real Christmas classics. But they are either eaten quickly or sit around until they become rock hard and inedible. For this DIY you don't have to waste food, but instead you can really reuse old cardboard boxes.

What you need for the gingerbread house garland:

• Brown cardboard or cardboard
• White acrylic paint, chalk pens or creative markers in white (you can get it here on Amazon*)
• Pencil
• Lineal
• Scissors or cutter
• Punch pliers or pointed scissors (for holes)
• Twine, cord or ribbon (e.g. jute ribbon)
• Optional: glue for additional decorations
• Optional: Colorful decorative elements: glitter, beads, pompoms, scraps of fabric, buttons

Step-by-step instructions:

1. First, draw little gingerbread houses on the brown cardboard. You can use different sizes and shapes to give the garland a playful look. The basic shape of a house is simple: a rectangle for the house and a triangle for the roof. If you're not sure what the houses should look like, you can search for templates online or draw the shape freehand in pencil.

Tipp:For symmetry, you can sketch out a house once and use it as a template for the others.

2. Now cut out all the drawn houses with scissors or a cutter. You can make as many houses as you want, depending on how long you want your garland to be.

3. Now comes the most fun part: decorating the gingerbread houses! You can use white acrylic paint or white marker to draw details such as windows, doors, roof shingles, or icing decorations onto the cardboard. Let your creativity run wild and design each house differently. Candy canes, hearts, stars or curlicue patterns give houses a playful Christmas touch.

4. To make your gingerbread houses even more Christmassy, ​​you can decorate them with other materials. Glue small beads to the roofs as “candy” or add tiny pompoms as Christmas balls. Glitter glue can imitate snow or sparkling lights on the houses. You can also use scraps of fabric for colorful doors or stick on buttons as decorative elements.

5. So that the houses can later be hung up as a garland, punch them with hole pliers (order here from Amazon*) or sharp scissors, make two holes in the top of each house - one on the left and one on the right.

6. Cut a long piece of string or cord - the length depends on how many houses you want to use and how long you want your garland to be. All you have to do now is thread these through the holes and hang the garland, for example over the fireplace, on the window, on the wall or wrapped around the Christmas tree.

More tips:

• If you want, you can design the houses in bright colors instead of classic brown - e.g. b.pastel colorsfor a playful, modern version.
• For a more sculptural look, you can use thicker corrugated cardboard or the housesdesign multi-layeredby gluing different layers together.
• Thread a small oneLED fairy lightsthrough the houses to illuminate them from the inside - this will make your garland even more festive.