City Skyline

Make a city skyline recycle craft with the kids or surprise them with a stunning nightlight.

This recycled craft project won’t take too much of your time, needs minimal materials and the effect is beautiful. If the kids are going to help, let them choose the size and shapes of the buildings, colors for the windows, and do the painting.

You will need:

• Rectangular boxes
• A larger box for the background
• Black and silver craft paint
• Colored tracing paper
• A string of Christmas or LED lights
• Glue
• Craft knife
• Steel ruler
• Punch
• White pencil and ruler

What to do:

Open the boxes and cut a slit down the middle of one side of each box. Paint the boxes on the wrong side, using black craft paint. (You can paint the shiny side, but you will find you will need a lot more coats of paint to cover the boxes)

Open the larger box – cut the excess cardboard off, keeping only the large side and the two flaps. (I used a Bakers cookie box which happened to be a perfect size.) Paint the background black.

When the paint on the small boxes is dry, use a white pencil and mark out the windows. Use different sizes and keep some of the windows black to give the effect that some lights are off. Use a craft knife and steel ruler to cut out the windows.

Turn your box with the wrong side facing up and glue the colored tracing paper in place to cover the widows. You can use different colors of tracing paper to give a more interesting effect.

Fold your boxes back to the original shape and cut a rough square in the back of each box.

Place your buildings onto the background and mark the background with dots to align with the holes in the back of the boxes. Punch the holes large enough for the lights to go through.

Using a glue gun, glue to buildings to the background, placing the bottom of the buildings on the bottom flap of the background. Glue the top flap to the tops of the larger buildings.

Touch up with black paint where needed and dot a few silver stars onto the background. Finish your project by pushing the Christmas light through the holes.  Switch on!

A beautiful city skyline recycle craft that will “bright up” any room!