Guest Designer Meg Danforth: Make Your Own Lafayette Square

Cottages, Free Pattern, Guest Designer

I am so excited about this post! This week I am honored to be able to share the pattern for Meg Danforth’s Lafayette Square.

What is so exciting this time is that 1) it’s a Victorian, which are always my favorite, 2) Meg makes gorgeously detailed buildings, and 3) Meg is a ringer with Inkscape and makes her own SVGs! Plus Meg has done all of the hard work of sizing the pattern to fit with the Tim Holtz Village dies.

If you would like to be a guest designer Just reach out to me to work out the details. While finished SVGs make me extra happy, I would also be willing to convert PDFs or (gulp) – hand drawn patterns. Those take me the longest to make and share, however! My main requirement is that you allow me to share the finished files for free on my blog for a minimum of a month.

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Make Your Own Mid-Century Modern House

Cottages, Free Pattern

Recently, I received an order for another custom aluminum can house based upon a real house. This one ended up being a real challenge, not only because I had never designed a Mid-Century Modern house before, but because the buyer only sent me one skewed picture of the front of the house. The buyer told me to put it in a winter setting and use my imagination to fill in the back.

I let my imagination run wild on the back, and thus the back of the house has the big windows that are common on Mid-Century Modern houses. For this reason, I expect as many people will want to display the back of the house as the front. I am not providing a Putz back with a hole in it in my pattern. This house really wants to be lit from the bottom!

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Glitter Town: More Putz Houses From the Creative Mind of Steven Leeds

Cottages, Free Pattern, Guest Designer

While we are waiting for Steven to design the promised last 4 buildings in his North Pole series, I have started converting the other patterns he has sent me. Steven Leeds designs traditional Putz buildings using CAD and cuts them out of chipboard. He was posting his patterns in PDF form in a Facebook group we both belong to, and people began to ask for his files in SVG format. I volunteered to convert them so they would work in Cricut Design Space, and since Facebook wouldn’t allow me to share SVGs, host the files on my site. I started with the North Pole series as they were the newest, and Steven was very open to feedback on how to design with CAD so that the patterns were easily converted to SVGs. The other set of files Steven sent me (17 in total!) he designed more than two years ago and they are proving to be a bit more challenging. Steven didn’t name this set, so I have called them Glitter Town.

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3D Park & Garden Benches

Free Pattern, Village Accessories

This week someone in one of the Putz House Facebook groups asked for a bench to go with a building they had made. I couldn’t remember if the person asked for a park bench or a garden bench, so I made both! The sides of each bench are interchangeable, and since I couldn’t decide which seat I made for the garden bench I liked best, I included all four.

These patterns can be cut out of Kraft Board, though I also really liked the look of the 100 lb. cover cardstock. Of course they are even more fun made out of aluminum cans!

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North Pole: The Wonderful Putz Houses of Steven Leeds

Cottages, Free Pattern, Guest Designer, Holiday

I’ve met another generous designer who is willing to share his designs! Steven Leeds designs traditional Putz buildings using CAD and cuts them out of chipboard. He was posting his patterns in PDF form in a Facebook group we both belong to, and people began to ask for his files in SVG format. I volunteered to convert them so they would work in Cricut Design Space, and since Facebook wouldn’t allow me to share SVGs, host the files on my site. Steven has plans to increase his North Pole Village, and I will add additional patterns into my library when he does.

Steven has given me his permission to change his patterns to resize, add window frames & doors, etc. I will begin to do so as I find the time, of course resizing them to fit with the Tim Holtz Village houses. For each of those I will write a tutorial blog post. I probably won’t modify them all, so if you have a request for a specific building let me know.

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