3D Beach Accessories

I finally made a few 3D beach accessories to go with the Beach House pattern I published last August. I began by thinking about what items I would take with me if I was to go hang out at the beach. A towel, sunscreen, and my phone loaded with an audiobook is probably all I would need, though I would search out a palm tree to sit under as I burn easily. The audiobook isn’t really necessary as the sound of the waves at the beach always lull me to sleep within minutes. Ack, that wasn’t enough, so I threw in a beach chair for my husband, a beach umbrella in case there weren’t any palm trees to sit under, and then a couple of surf boards just because I knew they would look good leaning against the Beach House platform, not because I have ever surfed. I am sure if I had ever tried I would have needed the life preserver.

There are many other items you can make to add to your beach house scene. A toothpick and some thread would make a good fishing rod. You could make yourself a sandcastle using sand and glue or some other binding agent. Don’t be limited by my suggestions. If you think of other ideas please let me know and I can add to this post! Currently, these are the accessory patterns included:

Palm Tree
Beach Chair
Beach Umbrella
Surf Boards
Life Preserver

In addition, I used a piece of striped washi tape to make a beach towel for my scene.

This Is How You Make the Beach Accessories

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The Beach Accessories Specific Materials

My free pattern for the Beach Accessories from the A Cottage in the Forest Library. Design #72. Get the password for free by filling out the form at the bottom of this page
A roll of green crepe paper for the leaves of the palm tree. Though I include a link to Amazon, I bought mine from the Dollar Store.
Striped or patterned Washi tape or washi paper.
Wood toothpick.

Favorite Materials Supply List

Cardstock, Cardboard (Kraft Board), 30 point Chipboard, or Aluminum Can – your choice!
Translucent Vellum or pictures to go in the windows.
Glue – If using cardstock, I suggest Bearly Art Glue or Art Glitter Glue. For aluminum cans, I use Aleene’s The Ultimate Glue. For cardboard or chipboard houses, I like Aleene’s Fast Grab Tacky Glue. I put it in a bottle with a thin metal tip.
If using chipboard or kraft colored cardboard, start with a base of either Liquitex white gesso or black gesso as primer.
Decorative papers (optional – for cardboard.)
Multi-surface satin finish acrylic paints or Ranger Distress Inks or Distress Crayons (for cardboard or cardstock.) Both the FolkArt and the Craftsmart paint brands work equally well. If you use distress inks, make sure they dry thoroughly before handling the pieces or you will have stained fingers. I speak from experience.
Glitter Gel Pens. I love these for coloring in small details. The company also carries another set with metallic, neon and fluorescent gel pens.
Tim Holtz Texture Paste or Tim Holtz Distress Grit Paste to make brick or stone chimneys, walls or sidewalks. I actually prefer grit paste as it makes my stonework look rougher or more craggy than texture paste.
Stencils to use with the texture or grit paste to make stone or brickwork. Be careful to buy or make stencils that fit the scale of your building. For brickwork I often use the Honey Bee Salvaged Bricks stencil or the Stretcher Bricks stencil I cut myself. For stonework I usually use either the Chimney Stone stencil I made myself, or the Stampers Anonymous Tim Holtz Mini Set #28 Stencils.
Bone folder (optional, but strongly suggested) A bone folder helps you make sharp folds when you are using cardstock or cardboard. I have found it even helps with aluminum cans. I now use my bone folder to deepen score lines all the time.
A Cutting Machine like a Cricut Maker or Cricut Explore
A hand-held craft blade like an X-Acto knife or Cricut TrueControl Knife. I also have a hand-held knife called the Excel Knife. It is nice in that it uses the cheaper craft blades, but the blade doesn’t work its way loose like the blade in my X-Acto knife often does. You will also need a cutting mat or a glass media mat to cut on.
Metal Edged Ruler with cork backing
An Embossing Machine and folders.

How To Make The Beach Accessories

Download the Beach Accessories Pattern

Download the Beach Accessories pattern from A Cottage in the Forest Library. It is design #72. Don’t forget to unzip it. The pattern is available in multiple formats – as a SVG (scalable vector graphics), DXF (drawing eXchange format), as a studio3 file for Silhouette, or PDF file. I now include a 1″ square in with all of my SVG files. Scale the pattern so that the square is 1″ to make the beach accessories in the size they were designed. Of course the wonderful thing about SVG files is that you can easily scale them to make your beach accessories whatever size you would like.

Import the Beach Accessories into Design Software and Cut

As of this blog post, a Cricut Design Space update broke the attached score lines. You will need to go through the pattern in Design Space and change the score lines to Score and then attach them to their object.

Here is a great tutorial from Jennifer Maker’s website on attaching score lines. I have started making all of my score lines red so that you can tell that they are intended to be score lines.

Cut out all of your pieces using my pattern. Since many of the items are very small, the detail may not cut well if you use thicker cardstock. If you find this is the case, cut the item out twice using thinner cardstock and glue the pieces together.

How to Make the Palm Tree

Cutting Line Guide …

Lay your tree pieces out, matching the cutting lines on your pieces to the red cutting lines in the picture above. Your trees will look different than those in the picture. It is the cutting lines that are important.

I cut my palm tree out of brown cardstock, then glued the green crepe paper onto the leafy area making sure the lines in the crepe paper ran top to bottom. It is easiest to glue on the crepe paper while the pieces are flat.

Constructing the Tree

Slide piece B into the bottom of piece A until the bottom of the two trees align.

Slide the bottom of piece C onto the combined A & B from the top, making sure there are two pieces on each side. My palm tree is tree is not symmetrical. To get the curve in the trunk, you want to ensure that all matching sides are next to each other.

Slide the bottom of piece D onto the combined A, B and C from the top, making sure you slide it into the slot in Piece C.

Adjust the branches and the trunks so they are spaced evenly around the tree. If you want the ability to later fold your tree flat for storage, stop here. Otherwise, I find it helpful to glue the bottom pieces of the trunk together so that they maintain their star shape for added stability. You may want to pause between each step to glue the trunks of the trees together. I also often glue the top of the tree together.

If you want to, you can use a hole punch to punch round “coconuts” out of brown cardstock and glue them to the tree.

How to Make the Beach Chairs

The beach chairs are very delicate but look really cute when finished. I found it worked best to make sure the glue dried thoroughly between each step before moving on to the next. I only used 1 layer of cardstock, but you may want to cut two and glue them together to make them sturdier.

Glue the three chair connector pieces between the two side pieces. Let the glue dry thoroughly.

Cut a strip of washi tape or paper approximately 2 1/2″ long, and 7/16″ wide. Fold it over on itself and glue if necessary. Curve gently with your fingers. Glue to the top and bottom seat bars.

How to Make the Beach Umbrella, Life Preserver, and Surf Boards

Each of the rest of the items are fairly self explanatory. I cut each out of cardstock. Cut two pieces and glue them together if you want the item to be thicker. You can either paint your items, cut the colored patterns out of light cardstock and glue, or cut out of self-adhesive vinyl.

For the umbrella, I applied self-adhesive holographic vinyl before gluing the top together. I cut my toothpick to the desired length and glued inside.

For the surfboards, I changed the floral patterns to pen and drew them onto the surfboards. I glued two of the surfboard shapes together to make them thicker, then glued the surfboard fin to the back of the board. For the surfboard with the thick lines, I cut them out of self adhesive vinyl.

For the life preserver, I glued two preservers together then added the self adhesive red vinyl.

I used a strip of the striped washi paper to make the towel I hung over the edge of the Beach House platform. You can either glue sand onto your base, or glue on a piece of sandpaper.

That’s it! Enjoy adding your Beach Accessories to your Holiday Village! I would love to see pictures of your village using the Beach House and accessories. Please share photos with me by emailing me at Jackie@acottageintheforest.com.