Witnesses to the crucifixion

I spinning crafts for both Nicodemus and the woman at the well are rather popular choices so with a little nudge from a friendly comment I made up a version for the witnesses to the Crucifixion story. It depicts the Easter scene.

It’s three scenes have no words. It shows the city, Golgotha, and the garden. When it comes to characters I’ve included the three from the witnesses to the Crucifixion lesson as well as lots of extra’s. Where you place the characters and which you choose to use is totally dependant on how you are telling the story and which gospel is your base.

To make this craft you will need a pair of scissors, glue, a craft knife (can do this bit in advance) and the printout. Do not allow your printer to stretch the template. There are 3 pages to the PDF, this is because there are so many characters, if you use a photocopier I’d recommend snipping out the bits you need to see if you can reduce it to 2!

For printing in Colour PDF – 3 pages
For printing people and decor with No colour PDF – 1 page
For printing structure with No colour PDF – 2 pages

Start by cutting out everything – you’ll notice I’ve added dotted lines to this one to make it less tricky. If you want to stage the cutting just do the background, cross and base.

Carefully place the characters to one side for now. Take the large cross piece and remove one of the white squares with a craft knife, cut three sides of the remaining square.

Separate the 4 white boxes at the base of the cross, this will be used to attach it to your base.

Now it’s time for construction. Score if you you wish and fold the two cross beams, remembering to fold the white flaps too. Add a little glue to the white flap in the middle of the beam and slide them together.

Don’t stick your cross in place! It will go in the middle after the backdrops.

Construct the backdrops. The flaps on the base fold in opposite directions so the coloured one will be seen and the white one hidden.

Either glue directly to the base or glue all backdrops together and then glue the base onto them.

Now stick your cross in.

Time to get the decorations. They need to be folded so the flaps can be glued onto the base. You may wish to use sticky tack so they can be re-positioned.
Charcaters include : Nicodemus who helped put the body in the tomb, Simon Peter who looked into the empty tomb, 2 of Jesus (carrying the cross and resurrected with nail marks), Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Jesus as well as the centurion, Salome, and the ‘beloved’ disciple that accompany this lesson.

Note that the Jesus character with the cross has extra slits along the side of the cross so that it looks like it’s being dragged. This sadly makes it impossible to balance him so he must be stuck down.