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Recovering Christmas Crackers to match your table colours!

We were having a Christmas in July themed birthday party and I managed to get the job of being responsible for organising the decorations for the table.

I had a quick look through my own decorations and decided on a snowflake theme because I had a fair bit of this left over from last Christmas. I had some dangly snowflakes, bought a snowflake mobile and found some snowflake sprinkles. I ordered some green and white helium filled balloons with Christmas and snowflake images on them and thought I was almost done. What I needed next were some snow themed green Christmas crackers.

After trawling the shops for Christmas crackers for a while, it became blatantly obvious that I wasn’t going to get any from a retail outlet and turned to the Internet for help.

I found the perfect crackers on e-bay – in “Assorted Christmas Colours” (green, red and white in the picture) – at a very reasonable price. Yay!

They arrived in good time in one piece.

They were pink though.

I was far from amused and sent the seller a message pointing out that pink was not what I would call a Christmas colour and they agreed and offered to refund or replace the crackers. The only problem was that the replacements wouldn't arrive in time... So I decided that I would recover them to match the rest of the table.


Here's what I did...

Its pretty basic - once you have the concept in your head, you don't even really need the instructions.

Find some Christmas paper and cut it to the right length and width - just the width and length of the part of the cracker with the offensive colour on it.

And glue into place.

Just cut enough paper to cover the pink part of the cracker (I've already covered the ends of the crackers in this photo)


These crackers had a pink image only in the centre bit so I cut a square out of the Christmas paper that fitted over the image only.  
  
The green and red crackers on the right came in those colours and weren't "recovered".
The bottom left ones have had both the ends and middle recovered.
The top left ones have only had a patch put on the middle part.

 If I had more time (and thought there would be enough sober people and bright lights to really appreciate them) I would have painted the pink parts on the top crackers green (or maybe white).

Easy to do and a cheap way of turning an already bought item into one that fits with your table colours or theme rather than having to spend more money, store them or throw them out.


Score card:
Green-ness: 3/5 for using rather than throwing something out - probably better to make your own or go without.
Frugal-ness: 5/5 for being able to find a way to use these rather than store them or throw them out.
Time cost: About 1/2 an hour
Skill level: Once again - simply cutting and pasting!
Fun-ness: More a sense of contentment when it all came together than fun!

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