An Attractive Agile Christmas Scene

We got creative with some spare Magnetic Dots and turned our black magnetic wall into an amazing festive scene.

We blogged before about our home kanban boards. Our first experiment got our son into a selective prep school and on the next iteration we discovered the joy of magnetic fixings for tasks on the whiteboard in our shed. Our next iteration is intended to bring the board back into the kitchen. 

We're going for a magnetic whiteboard painted onto one whole wall. MagPaint make some really promising paint and plaster products for making magnetic white or black boards. The problem: it takes a long time. It is now Christmas Eve and we still need to do another coat of the magnetic paint layer before we can paint whiteboard paint over the top. The unfinished wall is a big black rough square, right in front of the dining table. But you don't need to be in a festive pickle. This will also work with a finished magnetic blackboard (and you get to use chalk for details).

I didn't fancy doing a nativity scene, as I am not Christian, but there is something distinctively British and festive about rooftops and a church spire. I took a plain sheet of A4 paper, drew the outline of a church porch, spire and nave roof and included as much architectural detail as I could recall from those school trips 26 years ago. I then had the skyline drop and cross a street and then rise up the wall of a traditional townhouse, making sure to include a chimney and chimney pots inspired by Mary Poppins. I cut it out and flipped it over to hide the pencil lines. 

The grave stones and yew tree were slightly fiddly but straightforward to cut out freestyle. I just used the scrap paper from the nave roof. I cut this freehand to avoid pencils lines. Grandma chipped in an outline sleigh and outline reindeer. She took a break for an outline tower block, taking care to avoid any resemblance with well known blocks that might have been in the news. Outline Santa took a little longer, but outline gifts just meant hacking random straight cuts out of another bit of scrap.

Fixing them to the wall was very easy thanks to the wonderful self-adhesive magnetic dots we had lying around. We used whole dots for the larger pieces, but were content to use bits of scrap frame - the plastic that surrounds the dots. This is just as magnetic as the dots themselves and is thinner. Once the magnetic shapes were applied to the paper, they just snapped into place on the wall.

One dot can hold about 9 grams of stationery so we had no bother attaching our little shapes. The results were magic. We enjoyed it so much that Grandma quickly whisked up some icebergs and polar bears and made another little scene further along the wall.