How to Create a Beautiful Light-up Winter Village with Cardboard Tubes

What do you get with too many cardboard tubes, an Exacto knife, and flameless tea lights? A Light-Up Cardboard Village!

This cute little village is safe around little kids unlike those beautiful ceramic villages. In fact, kids will love helping to create this village.

Supplies for a Light-up, Cardboard Village

Cardboard tubes (did you know you could order these on their own?)
White Paper
Acrylic Paint
Glitter
Exacto Knife
FlamelessTea Lights (we even used some colored ones)

How to Create a Light-up Winter Village from Cardboard Tubes

I started with several cardboard tubes. I didn't want all the houses the same height, so the longer tubes were cut into a variety of sizes.

Now using an Exacto knife, I cut windows into each tube (definitely an adult step). Some had several. Some only had a few. Basically they were all different.

Now the kids got to help paint. Just a quick coating of color with acrylic paints. No details or anything too fancy, just a plain color. I was going to paint them all a single color like white or pale blue, but the girls had other ideas.

For the roofs, I made some simple paper cones. I didn't want them to be too thick because I wanted the light to shine through them as well, so I just used printer paper.

Using some Elmer's glue diluted with water, I added some sparkles (courtesy of CraftProjectIdeas.com) to each of the roofs too. This gave them an extra wintery look!

Now that I had a roof for each little cardboard tube house, I positioned them all on some quilt batting (also sprinkled with glitter) with a flameless tea light in each house. I just set the roofs on top, but you could glue them if you wanted.

And here is our little village! I had a few tea lights that change colors which are the girls favorites of course, so we used them too.

Then when you turn the lights off it looks like this! The girls were in love with it, so shiny and colorful! They ran around turning off the lights any time one got turned on just to see it glow!