Guest Designer Cheryl Sablotny: Mary’s Greenhouse

Free Patterns, Guest Designers / February 25, 2023

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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Guest Designer Cheryl Sablotny: Add An Attached Greenhouse

Free Patterns, Guest Designers / February 25, 2023

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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Guest Designer Cheryl Sablotny: Make Your Own Moss Lodge

Cottages, Free Patterns, Guest Designers / October 21, 2022

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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Guest Designer Meg Danforth: Make Your Own Lafayette Square

Cottages, Free Patterns, Guest Designers / January 21, 2023

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

Cottages, Free Patterns, Guest Designers / January 18, 2023

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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North Pole: The Wonderful Putz Houses of Steven Leeds

Cottages, Free Patterns, Guest Designers, Snow Village / February 26, 2023

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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