Did you know, every year, 40 million Christmas crackers are thrown away. That means that end to end, you can line them up which is 1,220 Mount Everests stacked on top of each other. (According to Resource.co) That’s an awful amount of waste for crackers, so we wanted to show you our Christmas Cracker craft. A sustainable alternative and you can add in little treats that aren’t full of plastic and using materials you can use time and time again.

We therefore made these Christmas crackers using our William Morris cotton napkins. There’s 4 in a packet and once everyone’s unwrapped their cracker, they’re obviously super useful! This is our Brother Rabbit design in red.

So without further ado – the things you’ll need:

• Napkins – one for each person at the table – we’ve got a whole collection of William Morris designs to choose from
• Cardboard tubes – we got these from Hobbycraft but they’re basically the cardboard of a toilet roll
• Ribbon or twine for the bows
• A joke and hat for everyone’s cracker – it’s still got to be a fun cracker and these are the wonderful elements, telling everyone your rubbish joke around the table and it wouldn’t be Christmas without a cracker hat. We got both of these things also from Hobbycraft
• Your treats for gifts. Now we’re trying to avoid the plastic cracker toys, so we opted for two things. For a budget friendly option, we filled them with chocolates – if you’ve got lots of people at the table, getting a tin of Quality Street works great to split some into everyone’s cracker. Or; you could give everyone more of a stocking filler gift. Last year, we took a gift out of everyone’s stocking and put it in their cracker to enjoy at the table. You need to make sure it fits in the tube, but you could include a mascara, mini aftershave, scrunchie etc.

How to make your cracker:

You’re going to start by laying your napkin, pattern side down on the table. Then take the cardboard tube and lay it on top.

We actually folded the edge in slightly – this makes it easier to roll and also makes the outsides of the cracker a little easier to manoeuvre when tying your ribbon.

Fill the cracker with your chosen goodies – hat, joke, present. If you’re making the gifts individual – remember to add a gift tag to it so you remember who it’s for!

Then let’s roll! from one edge of the cracker to the other, just roll your tube. Then take your chosen ribbon or twine and tie it tightly around one edge, then make it into a bow. Repeat on the other side. It might be a little hard to tie it the first time as it’s pulling all that fabric together, but it looks really effective once done. We used this sparkly gold ribbon with our Brother Rabbit design and we do love the colours together. We did try silver ribbon too and liked that too. We quite like using different ribbon so they’re all a little individual.

Now just make sure the two cracker ends are nicely fluffed up and your bow sitting pretty. Repeat for all your guests, and there you have it! If you make your own Christmas cracker craft using our napkins – be sure to tag us, we’d love to see!