Fabric Scraps, Bad Jokes & a Little Booze
Every month a few of my friends and I gather for our Saturday Stitch & Bitch club, although, depending on the month, there can be considerably more bitching, cake eating and tea drinking than actual stitching.
For this months get-together, we decided to make reusable fabric Christmas crackers. And you might be thinking: isn’t it a bit early to be thinking about Christmas but no it is not as it is less than 3 months away!
One of the our group had seen this fabulous no-sew reusable cracker tutorial from Aboderie and we largely followed their instructions, with a few changes and discoveries of my own along the way. If you’d like to see the original tutorial that inspired ours, have a look at Aboderie’s Easy DIY Reusable Fabric Christmas Crackers (No-Sew!).
I also happened to have some end-of-roll pieces of bhumi & pari hand block printed and screen printed fabric sitting around, which were perfect for the job.
And that is one of the things I particularly like about this project: you don’t need much fabric. If you sew, this is a great way to use those pieces in your scrap pile that are too pretty to throw away but not quite big enough to do much with. Woven cotton works particularly well because it is easy to glue smoothly onto the cardboard tubes.
The finished crackers also look rather gorgeous on the Christmas table. You can make them all matching, mix different prints together, coordinate them with your table setting, or completely ignore coordination and use whatever makes you happy.
There is also less rubbish at the end of Christmas lunch. I’m not going to pretend that a homemade Christmas cracker is going to single-handedly save the planet, but reusing something year after year, particularly when you can make it from cardboard tubes and fabric scraps you already have, seems a little more sensible than buying another packet of disposable crackers filled with tiny plastic objects nobody actually wants.
And, most importantly, you get to choose what goes inside. In our house it will be mini booze bottles because Christmas is mostly an adults-only affair these days. I suggested diamond earrings, which I thought would fit beautifully. My partner vetoed that idea.
What you’ll need
For each cracker you’ll need:
- 2 toilet paper rolls or one cardboard paper-towel roll cut in half
- Fabric of your choice – from bhumi & pari, of course! Or raid your scrap basket
- Iron
- Cutting mat and rotary cutter (optional)
- Scissors
- Pinking shears or any other “fancy” scissors you have
- Craft glue
- Paint brush
- Small container for your glue
- Sticky tape
- Ribbon
- Hot glue gun (optional)
- Cracker snaps
- A wooden skewer or chop stick – stay with me on this one
- Really bad dad jokes, printed and cut into strips
- Something fabulous to put inside
How to make your reusable fabric Christmas crackers
1. Prepare your fabric
Give your fabric a good iron first. It is much easier to get a smooth finish if you’re not trying to glue wrinkles onto your cracker.
Cut two pieces of fabric approximately 6 x 10 inches (about 15 x 26 cm).
Yes, I’m Australian and normally work in centimetres, but my cutting mat was marked in inches and apparently I abandoned the metric system for the afternoon.
The important thing isn’t absolute mathematical precision. Your fabric needs to be long enough to wrap around the cardboard tube with a small overlap and approximately twice the length of the tube, so that you have fabric extending beyond the cardboard at one end.
Use pinking shears, scalloped scissors or another decorative pair of scissors around the edges. Apart from looking pretty, pinking shears also help reduce fraying.
2. Make one tube slightly smaller
Take one cardboard tube. We’ll call this Tube 1. Make four cuts approximately 1.5 cm long into one end of the tube.
Slightly overlap the sections you’ve created and tape across them to hold everything in place. You’re reducing the circumference of this end just enough that it will eventually slide snugly inside Tube 2. Don’t make it dramatically smaller. You want the two halves to fit together firmly rather than having one rattling around inside the other.
3. Cover Tube 1 with fabric
Using your paintbrush, coat the outside of Tube 1 with craft glue.
Lay it onto one of your fabric rectangles. Position the smaller, taped end approximately 1 inch (2.5 cm) from one end of the fabric. This means you’ll have a short fabric overhang at the joining end and a much longer piece of fabric extending from the other end.
Roll the tube across the fabric, smoothing it down with your fingers as you go to get rid of wrinkles and bubbles.
When you reach the end, add a little more glue to the final centimetre or so of fabric and stick it neatly over the fabric already wrapped around the tube.
4. Repeat with Tube 2
Do exactly the same thing with your second cardboard tube. The only difference is that you don’t need to make this tube smaller.
5. Finish the joining ends
At the end where you have approximately 2.5 cm of fabric extending past the cardboard, put a generous amount of glue around the inside of the tube.
Fold the fabric inward and press it firmly against the inside. It will probably wrinkle a little. That’s fine. You can snip little notches into the fabric to help it fold around the curve if necessary. I actually found the little overlapping folds helped everything stay securely together.
Repeat with the second tube.
Now leave both halves to dry until the fabric and cardboard no longer feel damp.
6. Check the fit
Once they’re dry, test your two cracker halves. The narrowed end of Tube 1 should slide approximately 1 cm inside Tube 2.
Mine fitted quite snugly, which is exactly what you want. The cracker needs to stay together while sitting on the table but still come apart when two enthusiastic relatives pull it in opposite directions.
Some of the other tutorials we looked at used magnets or press studs/snaps to hold the two halves of the cracker together, but once I tested mine, I found they fitted snugly enough that I didn’t need anything extra to keep them secure.
7. Add the cracker snap – and meet the skewer/chop stick
This is where our wooden skewer or chop stick earns its place on the equipment list.
You need to feed the cracker snap into Tube 2, making sure enough of the end remains sticking out beyond the ribbon so somebody can grip it when the cracker is pulled.
Trying to feed a floppy cracker snap through two fabric-covered tubes can be surprisingly annoying. So: tape the snap to a wooden skewer. The skewer gives you something rigid to guide through the centre of the cracker. Push it through Tube 2 and leave the skewer and snap sticking out ready for the second half.
8. Add the ribbon to Tube 2
Tie a ribbon around the loose fabric at the outside end of tube 2, right where the cardboard tube finishes. I considered adding a little hot glue underneath the ribbon to make sure it stays firmly in place but decided against it so I could untie the ribbon and reload it next year.
9. Fill your cracker
Now for the fun bit. Add your terrible dad joke and whatever treats you’ve decided to put inside. You could use chocolates, little handmade gifts, sewing notions, fancy tea bags, tiny beauty products or something specifically chosen for each guest.
We are putting miniature booze bottles in ours. As previously mentioned, diamond earrings would also fit beautifully.
Just saying.
10. Put it all together and add ribbon to Tube 1
Use your skewer to guide the snap through Tube 1. Once it’s through, remove the skewer, then slide the narrowed end of Tube 1 approximately 1 cm into Tube 2.
Make sure you still have enough cracker snap protruding from both outside ends for people to grip when pulling.
Tie a ribbon around the loose fabric at the outside end of tube 2, right where the cardboard tube finishes.
And that’s it!
You now have your very own reusable fabric Christmas cracker, ready for Christmas lunch.
Use them again next Christmas
The nicest part of this project is that the cracker itself doesn’t have to go in the bin after lunch. Once it’s been pulled, separate the two halves, remove the used snap and contents, and pack the fabric-covered tubes away with your Christmas decorations. Next year you can add a new snap, another dreadful joke and completely different gifts.
They would also make a lovely little Christmas tradition. You could use the same crackers every year, make a particular fabric for each member of the family, or gradually add new ones as your Christmas table grows.
And if you have beautiful scraps left over from sewing projects, it’s a lovely way of giving them another life rather than throwing them away.
A few ideas for making them your own
Don’t feel you have to make six identical crackers. Mixing different prints can look fantastic, particularly if you keep the ribbon consistent to tie everything together visually.
You could also add lace or decorative trim. One of our group added some iron patches from spotlight using the initial for each of her family. You could also screen print, stamp or embroidery a name of initial on their too. Maybe use different fabrics for each person, or personalise the contents rather than putting the same thing in every cracker.
Most importantly, don’t worry about making them perfect.
Ours were made around a table at Stitch & Bitch, accompanied by way too much tea and snacks, good chats and probably rather less concentration than most craft tutorials recommend.
Which, frankly, is exactly how crafting should be.
Original inspiration: I largely followed the excellent tutorial Easy DIY Reusable Fabric Christmas Crackers (No-Sew!) by Aboderie, with a few adaptations and techniques that worked for us along the way.
And if you’re looking for an excuse to use some gorgeous cotton fabric for your crackers… well, I might know a place.
We used our Red and white floral fabric for the cracker in these pictures.