Sharon's blog: Tutorial: Making a Nutcracker

I promised my friends in the Garden Art forum to do a tutorial on making a Nutcracker for the holidays. I chose to write it here because the blog feature is a little easier for me to manipulate pictures and words than in a thread.

The nutcracker is made from throw away items you might find in your trash, and you can make it from most anything that provides the shape you need. The example I'm showing you is purely for indoor use because I used mostly food boxes and paper towel rolls and covered them with paper towels, but you'll see the process is adaptable to a lot of things.

You can use boxes, cans, paper towel rolls, bottles, butter tubs, lids and plastic or styrofoam cups. You'll need also a roll of paper, I used paper towels. If you are making this little guy for indoors then you can use any type of glue, paste or Mod Podge as the stiffening agent. If you prefer to make your guy for outdoors then I'll give you other materials at the end of these instructions.

So collect your boxes, they'll be the skeleton of the Nutcracker. Here's a sketchy example.

Start stacking them just to see what will work. If you notice I started with butter tubs to attach the legs, but the legs were bottles and were too heavy, so I had to omit the butter tubs.

Next you'll need Mod Podge or even Elmer's white glue will work. Add about a half cup of glue or podge into a fairly large pan, then a little more than half cup of water to it. Mix till it's creamy.

Tear strips of paper toweling or whatever kind of paper you use, newspaper works well too. Just tear lots of strips because you'll be working quickly.

Dip each strip into your liquid glue then begin to cover each individual box or bottle that you are using with the strip. This is very messy so cover your work surface. Smooth the strip as you go.

When you've added at least two layers of paper strips over each object, set them aside to dry thoroughly. Once dry, they will be stiff and stronger than without the strips, particularly if they are boxes or core rolls.

When they are completely dry, you can use either a glue gun or E6000 to attach your pieces to each other. Some people like to paint each individual piece before attaching the whole unit together and that's entirely up to you. If you notice in the picture on the right above, I used a rod that I pushed up through all the pieces simply to make sure I aligned them reasonably straight. I left the rod in it throughout the completion because painting it might also dislodge the pieces. The rod seemed to keep it secure.

The heaviest parts of this structure are the legs made from glass bottles. I didn't have pringles cans, so I made do with what I did have. Everything else is plastic or cardboard.

So now he's all glued together and you are ready to paint him. There are tons of Nutcracker images on the internet, all you need to do is Google Nutcracker images.

I just drew a simple design on his face and body, then painted in whatever colors I had. Oh, the epaulets (shoulder thingies) are the tops of the butter tubs that I didn't use.

You can embellish your guy with sparklies if you want, I added a few halogen paper pieces so mine catches the light on his hat and buttons. If you have gold buttons, gold braid, anything that might look like a soldier, because that's what nutcrackers really were, fierce protectors, use them. Here's a little history about nutcrackers:

Nutcrackers

Now if you want to make a nutcracker for outside then you'll need to use tin cans. You can use them as they are and simply paint them in the design you choose, or you can get a product called Pretex which will form a covering for them that is waterproof and then paint. I haven't used Pretex but I know others who have.

The directions I've given are a quick method of papier mache'. I thought you'd prefer quicker methods. But the problem is that if they get wet they'll disintegrate.  I'll solve that by keeping mine inside or on my porch.

I painted this one with acrylics simply because I had them handy.

I'll start a thread on the Garden Art forum and will link it here. That way you can post pictures of your Nutcracker when he's all ready to stand guard beneath your tree.

Have fun!!

Here's the link to take you to the Garden Art Nutcracker thread.

You can ask questions here or there, I'll just bounce back and forth.

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