DIY Cardboard Gingerbread Village

December 10, 2022


Three cardboard gingerbread houses for a village.

Hello there! I wanted to make some gingerbread houses for a village that I wanted to create and I wanted them to last long so I decided to make them out of cardboard. I'm going to show you how to make them too!

You can make your houses any shape that you want and you can add as many as you want to your gingerbread village. I just did three because that's all I had room for where I wanted to put the village.

Something else you can do is that you can design them however you would like. For instance, you can draw on wreaths, dots, or swirls around the windows and doors.

You also don't have to cut out the windows and replace them with parchment paper. You can just draw them on with a paint marker. I replaced them with parchment paper because you can see the light from battery powered tea lights behind paper.


What You'll Need:

Cardboard
Hot glue
X-acto Knife
Scissors
Pencil
Ruler
Parchment paper
White paint market or acrylic paint
Battery powered tea lights

1. You want to start out by drawing out a shape of a front of a house on a piece of cardboard.

2. Then you can cut it out with an x-acto knife.

3. Follow the steps 1 and 2 to make more houses.


4. The next thing you want to do is that you want to measure and cut out a strip of cardboard that's the same length as the bottom of the house, You also want to make the width of the cardboard to be about 2 1/2 inches or more.


5. Now when you're ready, you want to draw on windows, doors, snow, wreaths or anything else you would like on your houses with a pencil.

6. When you're done creating the design for your houses, you can cut out the windows with an x-acto knife and if you want you can also cut out the doors but you don't have to.


7. When you're done cutting out the windows or doors, you can outline and color everything thing in with a white paint marker or with white acrylic paint.

You can also add other things like dots, swirls, or other shapes around the windows and the door.


8. Once the paint is dry, you can take the strip of cardboard that's for one of your houses and put hot glue on the long edge of it.

9. Then you want to line it up with the bottom edge of the house that it goes too. Now while you're doing this make sure the house and the strip of cardboard are standing up straight before the glue dries

10. When the glue is completely dry, you can add more glue in the corner that's behind the house.

11. Follow the steps 8 -10 for the other houses.


12. For the windows, you want to cut out a piece of parchment paper that's larger than each window with scissors.

13. Then you want to put hot glue on the edge of a window and place the parchment paper on the window.

14. If you want you can add some more hot glue on the edges of the parchment paper so its stays on better but you don't have to do this.


15. When you're done with one window, you want to repeat all of the same steps for the other windows for the first house that your working on and all the other houses. Also make sure you don't get any glue to close to the edges of the windows and remove the strings from the hot glue off of the windows too.


16. The last thing you want to do for your houses, is that you can take battery powered tea lights and place them on the cardboard that's on the back of each house. 

If you're worried about the houses falling over you can put a rock or something else that's heavy on the back so you don't have to worry about it but you don't have to do this.


That's how you make gingerbread houses for a village out of cardboard!

Here's the final look of the houses together in the picture below.

Three brown and white cardboard gingerbread houses.

Now here's some close up pictures of the the houses so you can see the details of the houses better.

A cardboard gingerbread house with three windows and a door.

A cardboard gingerbread house with two windows, a wreath, and a door.

A gingerbread cardboard house with three windows and a door.

I love how all of these houses came out!

My favorite things about them is the designs that I made and how the light from the battery powered tea lights come through the parchment paper.

What do you think about these gingerbread houses and will you be making a village?

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