Christmas Crackers

Last week I about pulled my hair out over the challenge at Bah Humbug Blog but this week I'm set.  Last week was stencils (I could show you how to see what I made but honestly, I'd like to forget that creation).

Go get your coffee or a little something to hold you over.  I've got a story and something to show you.

The challenge was to make something to do with Christmas Crackers.  Here is the post so you can see what the design team made and the exact challenge. I recommend playing along if you get a chance. 

I decided to make Christmas Crackers.  I had been thinking about making these since Christmas Night but I hadn't gotten around to actually putting it all together.  My family normally has Christmas Crackers on the table when we have our traditional Trivial Pursuit game and a light meal.  We normally have this lovely meal of salmon, shrimp, cheese and crackers and some veggies and dip. We break open the Trivial Pursuit game and after a couple of glasses of wine we open our Crackers.  This last year we didn't have enough crackers for everyone.

I should be clear, we live in Atlanta, Georgia, USA and Christmas Crackers are not a normal part of the holiday.  We can sometimes buy them but they are terribly overpriced and not very good.  While I have a brother that flies home from London to Atlanta for Christmas, whatever extra space he has in his bags is reserved for Wine Gums (people claim you can buy these in the states but they aren't the same).

This is a box of wine gums.

So, I started thinking on Christmas night about making crackers for next Christmas.  The Wonderkid thought crackers were fantastic and couldn't understand why we didn't have them every night.  Half of this year's were musical instruments and the other half were random.  We wore the lovely tissue paper crowns for the remainder of the night and periodically I still find the whistles from the musical crackers in random places (hidden by the Wonderkid).

Enough about my excitement for this challenge.  Here is what I did.

I bought some paper at the post-holiday sales at Michaels.  This is the paper.

Then I went and searched SVGCuts.com because I thought they had a cut so I could make these in my E.  They did, it was even a freebie (have I mentioned how much I love SVGCuts?)  They keep all of their freebies on their blog.  Here is the cracker freebie.

So, I resized the cracker to the largest that would fit on an 8.5 x 11 piece of paper.  It ended up being 6.5 inches wide and 10.75 inches high.  I cut 6 of them out of three different pattern papers.

These are the three different patterns.

Then I added a tag.  The scallop is from Mini Monograms.  The sentiment is from The Cutting Cafe (a great place to find digi stamps, especially sentiments in a circle). 

Then, I added a brad to the scallop to attach it to the cracker.  I added 1/4 inch grosgrain ribbon to tie the crackers shut. 

This is what it looks like.  I haven't added the candy but I have a tissue paper hat inside already.  I'll open one end up and add the candy in December.  I read online you can purchase the mechanism that make them "crack".  I'm off to purchase some for this year.

I hope you like my creation.  If you know where to get the internal pieces, I'd love to hear.  Thank you for looking and have a wonderful day.