Build your Christmas village one can at a time
Just in time for Halloween, here are 3D spooky trees designed using the slot method. With my previous posts, 3D Leafy Trees, and 3D Evergreen Trees II, there are now 15 different trees using this method that you can make to decorate your village.
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After making the patterns for the 3D Leafy Trees this summer using the slot method, I decided that I needed to update my prior patterns for 3D Evergreen trees to use the same method. I ended up updating 3 of the previous patterns and making 2 new patterns. As we head towards fall I hope to make more winterscapes, and I like to use evergreen trees for winter villages.
Since I’ve broken my arm and can’t use more than the tips of my fingers, I also had to come up with models I could do one-handed. At least I thought I could do these one-handed, but even holding them in my left fingertips as I tugged down the slots with my right hand ended up being too much stress on my left arm for now. I do want to make a set of spooky trees for Halloween, but may need to wait until someone can help me make the models.
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Trees add interest to your holiday village, and 3D trees add depth. You can glue them onto your bases, or scatter them around between your houses. Many people like to use pre-made sisal trees. While you can get them in various sizes, every tree looks the same to me. I want more variety. So I started to make 3D trees by taking 2D tree cutting dies and folding and gluing them together. This time I tried experimenting with a slot method with leafy trees, and for the most part it works well.
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As I have slowly been making my way through Steven Leeds’ Glitterhouses, converting them from PDFs to SVGs, some of the patterns have been calling me to flesh them out with window frames, doors, or other small changes. But when I got to Glitterhouse #12, a complete yet altered picture of the house flashed into my mind. I actually had to hold myself back from making the changes to Steven’s files right then, and instead published them as he had envisioned the house. Then I set to work making the SVGs of the house as I had visualized it.
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While I am still working on a building pattern for April, I thought I would sneak in this pattern for a little outhouse.
For Christmas each year, I make a different miniature (less than 2″ high) aluminum can building ornament for each of my nephews. This last Christmas, I had thought to make a schoolhouse for them, but my sister mentioned that her boys hadn’t actually been in school since early March – so she didn’t think it fit the circumstances. Getting in the spirit of what fit 2020 best, I made the boys little miniature outhouses. I even cut up toilet paper and made a miniature roll for each outhouse, using part of a toothpick to roll up the toilet paper. Of course, I probably should have had empty rolls in each outhouses to commemorate the great TP shortage of 2020.
Though I have been in a Victorian mood recently and hence added lots of trim to my my outhouse, the pattern works fine without the trim too.
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