Gingerbread House

For some years now I have made my own gingerbread house from scratch and it has become a little Chrismas-tradition for me. I just sit down and start drawing on some ideas and when I am satisfied with one idea I start to make the paper templates for it. In the following pictures you can see how my templates looked like and I have noted the real measurements for them on the papers too.
I made several styles this year but I kept coming back to the idea of a house with wrong proportions and oblique angles.
Here in Sweden you cna buy ready made gingerbread dough and I always buy. If you have the opportunity I recommend you to buy the dough because it is quite time consuming but if you want to you can always make it yourself. Just be aware that the dough needs to rest for a day in the refrigerator before you start making your house.

When all your house parts are baked and you have let them cool so they are hard, it is time to put them all together. For this I melted ordinary white sugar in a frying pan. Be careful with this sugar because it gets very hot very fast! When the sugar has melted you can put the frying pan on a trivet while you dip the house parts into the sugar and quickly put the parts together. The sugar solidifies quickly on the houseparts so work fast. The sugar will get cooled down in the frying pan while you work but don't worry, you can always put the frying pan back on the stove burner and the sugar will melt agian. When you are finished with your house you can boil water and gently stirr it into the cooled sugar, put it on the stove burner and the sugar will dissolve in the water after a while, remember to stirr well.

If you think it is a bit scary with this hot sugar you can just skip it and put all parts together with the icing instead. Here is the recipe for the icing I made:

Icing 

4 deciliter icing sugar

1 egg white

1 tablespoon juice from lemon

Mix the ingredients with a electric beater until it gets stiff.

Put the icing in a piping bag or do your own piping bag by using a plastic bag and after filling it with icing you cut a small hole in one corner.

Christmas Origami Moon and Angel

This week I will show you two tutorials how you fold a moon and an angel to decorate your Christmas tree with! For the moon I tried using both aluminium foil and ordinary paper you use for your printer, and I think it is better to use ordinary paper or baking paper (like the one I used for the angel, see tutorial) if you would like a more transparent and graceful moon. Foil is very sensitive and as you can see on my moon in foil it has many wrinkles. Personally I like it best without all those wrinkles but maybe that is the appearance you are looking for! The angel is an abstract symbol more than a full detailed figure, perfect for you who likes the simple and clean look. On the back of the angel there is a pocket just beween the wings, which you can use to put the angel in the top of your Christmas tree :)
I found these origami models in a book called "Origami - konsten att vika papper", or in English "The Origami Bible", by Ashley Woods. Click on the titles to get to one Swedish and one English webshop.

Happy folding everyone!

How to make an angel
You need a paper in size A4 (= 210×297 mm) ordinary printing paper or transparent paper such as baking paper.
(You can click on the pictures to make them larger)

How to make a moon
You need a paper in size 150×150 mm ordinary printing paper, aluminium foil or transparent paper such as baking paper.
(You can click on the pictures to make them larger)

Advent Candlestick

This weekend I want to show you one of my Christmas crafts to make December a little more personal. I made a advent canlestick out of "salt dough" forming it like a braid and decorated it with typically "Christmas-things" like gingerbread heart, trees and presents. My thought was to place one thing for each candle until you reach Christmas (and sometimes the 4th advent is the 24th of December and that is the "big celebration day" in Sweden. 
1st advent candle 1 = Gingerbread
2nd advent candle 2 = Christmas trees
3d advent candle 3 = Lucia crown (13th of December)
4th advent candle 4 = Christmas presents

On this picture homemade saffron buns - it does not get more Christmas than that! 

Recipe for the "salt dough"
2 deciliter salt (as fine as possible)
3 deciliter water
3 teaspoons ordinary cooking oil
6 deciliter flour

Mix salt, water, oil and flour and stirr until you get a smooth dough. Be careful when adding the flour little by little and feel with your hands so the dough does not get dry. Now the dough is ready to work with!

If the dough is too dry your things may get a cracked surface so it is important that you add more water to the dough if that happens. You can also put water on your fingertips and gently rubb the surface and the cracks will get smoother.
I wanted to make the braid look like bread so I brushed the braid surface with beaten egg. 

When you are happy with the things you have created it is time to dry them so they get hard so you then eventually can color them. This advent candlestick took a long time to get really dry, I think I put it in the oven on 80 Celcius (don't use higher temperature because it can cause the dough to crack) for 8 hours because it is quite thick. I also used a oven with convection.

To make the braid I used about 3/4 of the dough and used 1/4 for the small things on top.
I bought light cuffs from my craft store and I pushed them into braid before drying it in the oven.
When the candlestick was dry I painted the small things with acrylic paint, I like the texture of acrylic paint because it covers very well and you don't need to use chemicals to clean your brush.
When the paint is dry you should varnish all surfaces to get a nice shiny finish and to protect against liquids (salt dough can not withstand water). I used a semi-gloss waterbased varnish from Panduro Hobby (click on the name to get to their English homepage!)

To make the knobbly surface of the trees and the Lucia crown I used a tweezer.

Here is the candlestick ready to go into the oven.To secure the trees I put a toothpick into them and pushed into the braid for support. But you can see in next picture that one tree bend down a bit anyway.

Here it is dry and ready to be painted. 

You can see that the braid has a bit more yellow surface because of the egg.

Red Plaid Christmas Apron

Now when we are getting closer to Christmas I thought it would be fun to have some Christmas-inspired crafts these few weeks before the big holiday of the year :) When I was little my mother had an apron she only wore during Christmas. She had sewed it by herself and I remember it was striped in red colors. I was inspired by that apron and I wanted one for myself! My apron is not extravagant in any way, it is clean and simple, but I think many like it simple and it suits everyone!
So lets go! Below you can find a tutorial in pictures and text step by step, I hope you like it :)
(You can click on the pictures to make them larger)