I could really kick myself for not taking all the photos of the progress and on how I made my own Stand-Alone Paper Mache Elf, for my Shop’s Christmas outdoor Decoration.
I did do a few although the quality isn’t the best I still wanted to share my pride and joy.
I used strong card rolls recycle from a local tailor, you know the ones that are used to roll the materials on, some of them were 2 meters long and were perfect to cut to the size. I also used the good old newspaper and some stiff card.
I searched high and low on the internet for help and ideas how to make one, but at the time never found anything so just jumped in and thought I would play it by ear…
The legs, the arms the head and the body were all constructed separately and then assembled.
My hardest challenge was getting the proportions right and what really made me struggle was the head.
I remember I kept on measuring the circumference of my own head and kept on adding gluey paper until I got the size just about right!!!
I started off by making the feet, o I wish I had a photo of these as to start off with they looked like ballerina shoes. I basically just scrunched up some newspaper and started building from there.
It was around January time when I started it which in a way was perfect as we had an open wood fire going on every night, so each evening when I finished adding more paper to my creation and fire had almost died down I would leave the wet pieces near to dry out.
By the June came around he was all done; I used pretty small pieces of white paper to finish him off so that I had a nice clean base ready to paint him and then I left him on our veranda to dry our properly over the summer.
My son will not be happy if he knows I have shared this photo lo but I wanted to show just big Efly was, even though a few years later I had a photo with him too lol!!!
My daughter helped me to paint him and that was the a really fun part.
For the socking’s on his legs, I used pieces of lace, that I first just sprayed with a bronze coloured paint, then using my hands covered in glue I modelled the lace on to the legs, once they were dry enough I painted them with a gloss paint.
For the edging on his coat, again I used a lace, this time I used a gold spray paint, although it came out more like bronze, which worked quite well all the same.
The edging on his collar is the same lace just sprayed with red paint.
The eyes were taken from a one of my kid’s old soft toy as was the white pompon
In this image below you can my snowman in making too lol
Here is a photo of him standing in my homemade outside garden in from of my cake shop
And finally one of me and him together
o yes nearly forgot the finished Snowman
here is the full collection of all my homemade outdoor Christmas Decorations
Have a Great Steeming Weekend Folks
Arriverderci until Soon!
Susanna @lobbylux