Make Your Own Marques Tower

This is the second and last of the castle patterns I am making at Lucy Foxworth’s request for her Make A Castle Challenge. I had known that I wanted to explore hexagonal and octagonal towers, and had a chance to do both when I made Hiorne Tower. Exploring making round towers was next on the list, so I looked for a castle for inspiration that had a round tower. Once I saw pictures of the Marques Tower at the Château de Chenonceau in the Loire Valley, France, with its round turret attached to a round tower, I knew I wanted to try to make it. This one was not easy to design, as the main roof of Marques Tower is designed to fit exactly on top of the tower without any overlap. I’ve always been good at math, but found myself particularly challenged, even with an online calculator helping me with the circumference, diameter, and arc lengths. Difficult as it was to design, however, it is easy to make.

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Make Your Own French Bond Stencil

I just started my model for my next free building pattern, the last of the castles I am designing for Lucy Foxworth’s Make A Castle Challenge. It has some stonework, and there are several ways I could make the stonesk, using either my texture folders like I showed you when I made Villa Torre, or using a debossing tip, like I did with Hiorne Tower. I also have the new stencil I cut when I made my version of Lucy’s Chateau. However, I decided it was time that I make and share a new stencil pattern.

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Make Your Own Hiorne Tower

This is the first of the patterns I am making at Lucy Foxworth’s request for her Make A Castle Challenge. Time permitting, I will release three patterns: Hiorne Tower, a tower or castle with a round tower, and a fancy church. Lucy will be sharing her trick for making round towers during her video this week and I didn’t want to get ahead of her, so I decided this first pattern would have hexagonal or octagonal towers. After an internet search, I decided on both.

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Make Your Own Villa Torre

I have had several requests in the last few months to update the Halloween-themed Abandoned Mansion so that it can fit into a Christmas Village. Of course I had hoped to have the pattern finished before Christmas, but alas, that was not in the cards. At first I had intended to just a simple change of the windows and doors and planned on leaving the rest of the building the same, but then Lucy Foxworth of Paper Glitter Glue told me of her Make A Castle Challenge and the next thing I knew I was making a hexagonal tower!

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Make Your Own Gingerbread Tudor

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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Make Your Own Little Crooked House

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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Make Your Own Beach House

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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Make Your Own Corner Store

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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Guest Designer Cheryl Sablotny: Mary’s Greenhouse

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.

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