Build your Christmas village one can at a time
For this month’s design, I set myself a challenge: I needed to make a house that was easy enough that children could build it as I am teaching another class in December. At the same time, I wanted to design a building that could look quite different depending upon how you decorated it. I also wanted a building that made me think of Christmas. When mentioning all of this to a friend, she suggested I design a classic half-timber Tudor style building.
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It is time for a new Halloween building! I decided I wanted to make something very different than the realistic looking buildings that I have a tendency to design. I also thought about how precise you have to be in making many of these buildings and decided I wanted to make a house where wacky angles and a lack of precision were celebrated. Hence, the Little Crooked House. If you find yourself lining up the steps or the dormer windows, you are making it wrong! I would really love to see pictures of just how wacky you make your house!
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While it is still summer I wanted to add a summer-themed house to the collection. My Beach House is not based upon any real building, but instead a recreation of an aluminum can house I made back before I bought a Cricut Maker, roughly based on a picture of a dollhouse I found on the internet. I used the Tim Holtz Village Dwelling die to make the original building, but I had to cut the platform out by hand so I only made it once as it was a fair amount of work. For my SVG I’ve made several changes to the house to make it look less like the Village Dwelling.
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I thought it was time to add another store to the village. I love having the houses in my holiday village surround a downtown park lined with businesses. And once again I wanted a real building for my model, so I found a picture of a cute corner store in England that I thought could be used for any kind of shop. While I wanted to make a little bodega like the ones I see when I visit my son in NY, I believe this building could easily adapted to make a coffee shop, little liquor store, or even a restaurant.
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When I published the second of Cheryl’s patterns for her two greenhouses, I promised a post with some accessories for the greenhouses.
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Last month Cheryl shared her Attached Greenhouse with all of us. This month, Cheryl has designed a freestanding greenhouse she named Mary’s Greenhouse.
Cheryl used a stencil and texture paste for the trim, floor and stepping stones. We are still working on an accessories blog post to complement the greenhouses which should be available shortly. Besides the few accessories I am designing, like the wheelbarrow in Cheryl’s pictures below, Cheryl will also share some of her landscaping ideas.
I hope that you are as excited as I am to have Cheryl back as a guest designer! I was afraid I had exhausted her after her design of Moss Lodge, but she has actually been designing additional patterns faster than I can keep pace. I need to find her a class on learning Inkscape.
This is the first of two greenhouses that Cheryl has designed. The second one will be for a freestanding greenhouse. Since I had greenhouses on my list of future items to design, I was very happy when she decided to make them. I am wondering how much more of my list I can casually suggest to her. Ahem… church…schoolhouse…bait shop on wharf…
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Last year after my friend Hollie opened a craft boutique locally where she sells my kits on commission, she asked me to design more beginner kits for the store. Holly Manor was the first of these designs, and is very easy to make. Yet almost immediately I had people who read my blog asking for bay windows for the building – an element I consider Intermediate instead of beginner. So I decided to make two story bay windows that you can add to Holly Manor.
Even if you made Holly Manor previously you can add on the bay windows as a later addition. The only other addition I made to the house is a deeper porch with roof instead of a step to the front door.
It has been almost a year since I last shared a pattern from a guest designer. I really enjoy working with other designers and wish that more were interested in sharing their patterns. I understand their hesitation, though. First, it is a lot of work to design a pattern to share or sell. I have made as many as 15 drafts of a building before being happy with the design. Also, when you know you are going to share a design you have to measure and be precise – you can’t just make a little change with your scissors and move on. You have to go back and revise your pattern for every little change – sometimes over and over again! Lastly, most designers I meet that don’t have their own blog or sell their patterns are only interested in making their pattern once for their own village and then moving on to the next building. Cheryl and I have spent most of this month working on the pattern and the models for Moss Lodge.
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While I have been steadily working on models and tutorials for more house designs, I also have several other models I have previously made that I need to finish landscaping. For one of them I wanted a US Mail drop box. While I thought I could cut one out by hand fairly quickly, I realized that it might be an accessory other people would want for their village, particularly if you made Teri Hanson’s Post Office that she designed for Putz House Monthly. You can’t have a Post Office without mail drop boxes out front!
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