Tutorials

This year I hope to add more village accessories to my library of free patterns. Making houses are fun, but it is always the little details of the accessories that can go with each house, or between them, that ties a village together. I have had occasion recently to repeatedly pass a house with a wishing well in the front yard. I thought one would look cute in my village

While researching dimensions of wishing wells, I found they vary greatly. You may want to make your wishing well larger or smaller.

I have a constantly fluctuation list of items I want to design. My list shifts with the season, requests, and sometimes my mood. Frequently, when I am researching one design I will see other designs I add to my list. This happened last month when I was looking at pictures of arbors for inspiration for my Rose Arbor, and saw several swing arbors. About the same time I received a request for a porch swing. It made sense to design the two together.

I found dimensions for both the swing arbor and the porch swing online, and made both to scale. However, I quickly found that none of the porches on the buildings I have designed, with the exception of the Gabled Octagon House, are deep enough to fit my porch swing. So I am already having to look ahead to designing a building with a deeper porch.

When I designed my Rose Cottage pattern several months ago, I knew I wanted to decorate it with climbing roses. At the time, I only had a few rose bushes, but I found a package of rose vines on Amazon. Even though they say HO Scale, I actually think they are perfect for the S Scale I use to make my village.

The package comes with 6 rose vines, 3 red and 3 pink. I used one of them to climb up the side of the building on the trellis from my Greenhouse Accessories. I got the idea from Donna Camacho’s version of Rose Cottage. I hadn’t even remembered that I had made a trellis!

I decided to make a Rose Arbor and fence to use two more of the rose vines. Of course I have already decided that I would like to make another house with a wisteria covered arbor. So far I haven’t found anything in the right scale. I will probably need to learn how to make my own.