Cottages Archives - Page 6 of 6 - A Cottage in the Forest

Make It With Me: Habitat Spooky Halloween House

Cottages, Halloween, Make It With Me / August 13, 2020

We are getting closer to Halloween…and miniature haunted houses! Both a good friend and one of my sisters goes crazy decorating for Halloween so I try to introduce at least one new Halloween house each year that they can add to their collection..

This year, in addition to a pattern I am still in the process of developing, I decided to add a haunted house designed by Lucy Foxworth and offered for free on her blog Paper Glitter Glue. If you haven’t visited Lucy’s blog you are missing out. Lucy started making miniature houses as a fundraiser for various charities. She made this one, based upon an actual vintage home in a historic district in Upstate SC, for a Habitat for Humanity fundraiser.

Join along with me as I make the Habitat Spooky Halloween House. I will be scaling the Habitat Spooky Halloween House to fit with the Tim Holtz Village dies.

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Make Your Own Fish & Chips Shop

Cottages, Free Patterns, Shops and Village Buildings / August 4, 2020

Perhaps it was the year I spent living in England when I was a teenager, but I am extraordinarily fond of fish & chips. So when a customer reached out to me, explaining that their family owns a fish & chips shop in Dublin and that they wanted a replica to join their existing Lemax village, I was up for the challenge. This replica was demanding as it is a different scale than I usually work with and really reached the maximum size I could make with aluminum cans. I actually offered to make it from cardboard instead of cans but they liked the uniqueness of the aluminum cans (thank goodness, as I can’t paint.)

Of course I also had in the back of my mind that I could scale and simplify the pattern a bit, and offer it here when I was done. While the building itself is a fairly basic rectangle, it does give me the opportunity to introduce some new elements like exploring different ways to make shop signs, printing and drawing on vellum, and joining together two story buildings of different material or textures. And of course, the picnic tables with patio umbrellas are just the cutest embellishment.

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Make Your Own Country Cottage

Cottages, Free Patterns, Houses / July 14, 2020

The Country Cottage was the first house I designed myself, so it seemed appropriate that it would be the first building pattern I offered. It has long remained one of my favorites. I originally cut the design by hand, then graduated to using Cricut Design Space once I got my Cricut Maker. Now that I have learned how to make SVG files I can share the pattern with you. Included with the SVG file in my library is a PDF pattern as well as a DXF file.

Over time the pattern has changed as I learned more about house styles and the characteristics that define those styles. With the Country Cottage, I specifically changed the window and chimney styles.

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What A Difference A Fence Makes

Cottages, Tim Holz Village / July 2, 2020

Until Sizzix released its addition to the Tim Holtz Village dies in the spring of 2016, my village was very boring. I could make a house, or I could make a church that looked like the house with a bell tower on top. My friends and family loved them both, and wanted their own, made of their personal favorite cans. That quickly got tedious. At the same time, I was still digging through trash cans trying to find enough aluminum cans to make these two buildings. I was ready to throw in the towel.

Thankfully, the Village Bungalow die was released and changed everything. Although it had only 5 new elements on it, it was a game changer. Suddenly I could add fences and gabled windows to my buildings. I dove into creative research and my buildings went from being merely structures, to creations.

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At The Beginning

Cottages, Tim Holz Village / June 4, 2020

I started my village with the Tim Holtz Village dies when they were first released in 2015. Now maybe you are already thinking, “How does this relate to me, I am just here for the SVG patterns and don’t have a manual die cutting machine,” and are about to click away from this post. Not yet, unless you want a village where both giants and Lilliputians live! You will want your handmade cottages to look like they belong together in a unified village. On this website I am going to resize all SVG patterns to fit with the Tim Holtz cottages. Thus you will have a consistent starting size, and then you can make your buildings larger or smaller to fit your needs. I like this size not only because it is where I started, but also because the traditional S gauge train layout works well around my new village, as do little 25mm wargame models.

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