My sister love nutcrackers. Christmas nutcrackers that is. These fellows:

While we were out and about today her daughter, Miss T (clearly influenced by her mother) was desperate to play with almost every nutcracker she saw. With this in mind, and as part of her DIY Christmas presents, I decided to make her some nutcrackers to play with out of clothes pegs.

I bought a packet of ten clothes pegs for $4 from Spotlight. You could possibly find these cheaper from a $2 shop, but it was harder for me to get there and I was going to have to go to Spotlight anyway for the fixings so I sacrificed the possible saving. If you’re trying to do this on the cheap you should be careful of where you do buy them from, one craft shop I looked at had them at $7/packet.

I started by cutting up some black fabric to make trousers for the nutcracker men:

Then I decorated the sides of each of their pants:

They each got a colourful top:

And I made them sparkly, too:

A sparkly crown followed:

And a face and a beard for each:

And voila!

I know they don’t look exactly like the above nutcracker men, but making nutcrackers out of clothes pegs turns out to be surprisingly difficult!

And just to add to the fun, since Miss T is still loving putting things in and out of other things, I made a little stand for them out of an old egg carton, too.

All up it cost me about $7 to buy the clothes pegs, black fabric, and miscellaneous ribbons. I already had the felt and sequins at home. That makes the cost of each of the nutcracker men that I made about $1, and I still have enough to make another 4 clothes peg dolls.

Of course, this project isn’t limited to making nutcrackers. You could make any kind of peg doll you liked!

Have you made any peg dolls? What did you design them as?