Make Your Own Holiday Village!
Welcome To A Cottage in the Forest. On this website my goal is to give you everything you need to make your own Halloween or Holiday Village using whatever materials are at your disposal. You can make your cottages out of cardboard, cardstock, recycled aluminum cans, or even recycled frozen food boxes!
This site offers unique free patterns, as well as more advanced patterns available for purchase. You will also find reviews, links and sizing guides to patterns offered by other sources. We will explore various ways to add snow and windows. I also offer accessories like trees, fences, animals and mailboxes that will make your village come to life.Â
For anyone who doesn’t want to make their own cottages, I also offer a limited number of buildings that I have made out of my personal favorite material, recycled aluminum cans.
Newest Tutorials
2026 Great Halloween Spooktacular
The 2026 Great Halloween Spooktacular will start soon! I will post the pictures of each of the projects and their dates. You have 24 hours to download the files and watch the instruction videos on the Spooktacular pages (9 am EST to 9 am the next day.) However, you still need to get a Free pass to do so. Once the day of the project is past, the only way you can get the project is to buy a VIP PASS. These will be available even after the Spooktacular ends.
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Make Your Own Old French Farmhouse
I have been working on this pattern for several months. I played around with how I wanted it to look, never quite happy, then recently found a picture on Pinterest that pulled together what I was looking for. I knew I wanted exposed stone walls. In February I made a stencil to use to make the stones, although I also just used my paintbrush to paint grit paste stones onto the walls, especially at the edges. I also designed this pattern so that the window trim is on the inside of the walls instead of the outside. You may have to pay extra attention when you glue on the trim.
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Make Your Own Stone Wall Stencil
Recently, there have been multiple people posting pictures to Lucy's Facebook group of their models decorated with stone walls or partial stone walls. Though there are multiple ways you can make stone walls on your models, my favorite is always achieved by using grit paste and a stencil. I am working on a building pattern where I want a deconstructed stone wall look, so I made my own stencil. If you want a stencil that can be used over and over again cut the stencil out of stencil material or other plastic. If you don't have any stencil material, however, you can make a one-time use stencil out of cardboard.
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