Do you know that feeling when the decoration at home is set to zero at the beginning of the new year?
The Christmas tree has long since been taken down, the last chains of lights have disappeared from the windows and front gardens, and even the streamers from the New Year's Eve party are gone.
And what is coming to the window now? Beautiful winter decoration that you can make together with your children.
Make snowmen with your children as winter window decorations
Do you also have children who love crafts and painting? Our older daughter can hardly be stopped. When Mr Beam or my plotter is running, the question "Mamaaaa, can I join in?" usually comes up straight away.
This time, she was even allowed to decide what we would do together for our wintry window decoration. That quickly became clear, because "it's winter and if there's no snow outside, I want snow on the window."
What you need for your winter window decoration
- construction paper, kraft paper or cardboard. Definitely in white, black, brown and orange. You also need a few more colours for the scarf and hat.
- White tracing paper.
- Book protection film
- Glue
- adhesive tape
- scissors
- For the snowflakes, you need either cotton wool or white pompoms.
You either attach these with
- line
- and sewing needle
or with
- Adhesive pads / double-sided tape
And of course you need your Mr Beam.
Your Mr Beam prepares the wintry window decoration for handicrafts
I put the file with the snowmen back in the Mr Beam design store for you. If you start your Mr Beam and go to BeamOS, you can buy them directly in the design store and load them into your workspace, for example to adjust the size of your windows.
Or maybe you even want to make a little snowman border with it?
Or should your snowman have buttons on his stomach? No problem, either you duplicate the desired number of eyes or you quickly create a few circles under “Shape” in BeamOS.
No matter what you make of it - despite the simplicity of the file, there are no limits to your creativity, because it is very variable. Once you have decided on the size and number of your snowmen, you can start lasering.
You should determine the settings for lasering your paper with a test.
First select paper as the material and then adjust these settings to the paper texture if necessary.
In my case, the colours played less of a role than the thickness of the paper.
This allowed me to laser several colours of my paper at the same time per laser job, as long as the thickness matched.
The window decoration for the winter is finished - then it's time to start crafting with the children
Preparations for crafting
First you tear up the white transparent paper. You need countless snippets for your snowmen, because you fill the snowman body with them. So the daylight shines through and they get a nice structure.
Once you've ripped enough snippets, you're good to go. Have everything ready that you need to craft your snowmen as winter window decorations.
Fill the snowman's body with your scraps of tracing paper
The book protection film goes on the back of the snowman. It forms the adhesive surface for your tracing paper snippets.
To do this, unroll a piece of the book protection film and place the frame of the snowman body on it. Now use scissors to cut out the foil very roughly around the snowman.
Take the snowman frame down and remove the backing paper from the book protection film. Fix the foil with adhesive strips on your table or the crafting mat, so you prevent slipping or that the foil sticks to your snowman crookedly or wavy due to static electricity before the correct positioning.
Align the frame on the foil and glue it in place. To do this, press the cardboard firmly onto the foil several times. Now use scissors to cut off the excess foil around the snowman.
Now the snippets are used. You can simply spread them wildly on the foil and press them down. Just be careful not to leave any gaps.
Now it's getting colourful in the wintry window decoration
Now you can finally give your snowmen some personality and breathe life into them, because they get a hat, a scarf and of course eyes and a nose. Even little arms will get your snowmen.
First glue the three parts of the hat together, then glue them to the snowman's head. The scarf naturally finds its place on the snowman's neck.
Glue the eyes and nose to the corresponding parts of the face with glue.
By positioning the nose and eyes, you can easily give each snowman a slightly different facial expression.
Glue your arms to the snowman from behind. Since the back is made of book protection film, I recommend attaching the arms with a sufficiently large piece of adhesive tape.
Your snowmen will get window decorations in winter
You can now attach your snowman parade to the window with pieces of adhesive film or double-sided adhesive tape.
And what would snowmen be without snowflakes?!
You can either use pompoms as snowflakes or form cotton balls into balls.
Here it had to be pom-poms with glitter, because "snowflakes also glitter in the sunlight." Pompoms are really easy to make yourself.
In order to be able to distribute the snowflakes all over the pane, I used double-sided adhesive tape, which can be removed without leaving any residue.
You can also hang up your snowflakes by threading them with a needle and string and then hanging them up.
I wish you and your children a lot of fun tinkering!
Your Rina
