Make Your Own Flower Cart

I have been wanting to make more accessory items for my village, but this month’s pattern was actually driven by my other hobby, beading. I love to bead ornaments, and have designed my own in the past, but prefer how relaxing it is to use other designer’s patterns. About a year ago I discover the designer Julie Glasser (J ulRiDesign on Etsy) and have been making my way through her patterns. She has designed a series of miniature beaded plants in pots and urns, and I decided they would look better in a scene than as ornaments for my tree. I bought myself a little domed terrarium, then decided I needed a flower cart for my smaller potted plants.

Julie has a pattern for a beaded flower cart, but to me it looks like a tea cart, not a flower cart. After a lot of measuring, I decided that the beaded plants were in half inch scale (1:24.) First I looked for an already made flower cart, then, not finding one I liked, I looked through SVG patterns for flower carts and bought one. Though it was designed in regular dollhouse scale (1:12) I shrunk it, cut it out and…it didn’t fit together!

I checked the original measurements, then triple checked the instructions, and nope, it still didn’t fit together. Since I use Inkscape I have the ability to edit SVG files, but it occurred to me that instead of editing the pattern to make it fit and just me benefitting, I might as well design a flower cart from scratch. There were elements of the purchased pattern I hadn’t really liked. If I designed my own cart, I could make one exactly the way I wanted. Of course now I just wish I had done this to start!

Thus I designed this pattern originally in half inch scale, then shrunk it down and remade it in S and O scales to test it. The pattern in my library is in S Scale. Look at my last post How To Change The Scale of a Patter n if you want to change it into a different scale.

And if you ever find one of my patterns that don’t fit together, please let me know! I do make mistakes, and though I make each of my patterns multiple times and one of my friends does test most of my patterns, an error could sneak through. I’d rather know about it than have you frustrated.

I also want to make additional carts. I did research on designs for carts and found several I really liked, not just flower carts, but food carts, coffee carts, and ice cream carts. In addition, Guest Designer Gerard Van Kerckhoven has sent me his design for a bicycle ice cream cart. I have been having trouble changing it to be simple enough to shrink it to S Scale, but hope that some of the things I learned while designing this flower cart will help me finish that design also.

Half scale flower cart and beaded potted plants. I am currently beading my fourth plant.

This Is How You Make the Flower Cart

Size of the finished flower cart in S Scale will be approximately 1 1/2″ W x ” 3/4″ D x 1 3/4″ H.

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The Flower Cart Specific Materials

My free pattern for the Flower Cart from the A Cottage in the Forest Library. Design #83. Get the password for free by filling out the form at the bottom of this page.
Flat nose jewelry pliers. I found these a necessity to grasp the cardstock and make the required tight folds in both S and O Scale.
Optional: Striped or patterned Washi tape or washi paper.
Optional: 105 lb. Stardream Metallic Cardstock. I used this so I didn’t have to paint any of these pieces, but I could have cut them out of cardstock and painted them with metallic paint. I found Art Glitter Glue worked well with the Stardream Metallic Cardstock.

Favorite Materials Supply List

Cardstock, Cardboard (Kraft Board or alternative), 30 point Chipboard, or Aluminum Can – your choice! Cricut is no longer selling Kraftboard, so I now link to the 120 lb. cover cardstock by Accent Opaque that I use.
Translucent Vellum or pictures to go in the windows.
Glue – If using cardstock, I suggest Bearly Art Glue or Art Glitter Glue. For aluminum cans, I use Aleene’s The Ultimate Glue. For cardboard or chipboard houses, I like Aleene’s Fast Grab Tacky Glue. I put it in a bottle with a thin metal tip.
If using chipboard or kraft colored cardboard, start with a base of either Liquitex white gesso or black gesso as primer.
Decorative papers (optional – for cardboard.)
Multi-surface satin finish acrylic paints or Ranger Distress Inks or Distress Crayons (for cardboard or cardstock.) Both the FolkArt and the Craftsmart paint brands work equally well. If you use distress inks, make sure they dry thoroughly before handling the pieces or you will have stained fingers. I speak from experience.
Glitter Gel Pens. I love these for coloring in small details. The company also carries another set with metallic, neon and fluorescent gel pens.
Tim Holtz Texture Paste or Tim Holtz Distress Grit Paste to make brick or stone chimneys, walls or sidewalks. I actually prefer grit paste as it makes my stonework look rougher or more craggy than texture paste.
Stencils to use with the texture or grit paste to make stone or brickwork. Be careful to buy or make stencils that fit the scale of your building. For brickwork I often use the Honey Bee Salvaged Bricks stencil or the Stretcher Bricks stencil I cut myself. For stonework I usually use either the Chimney Stone stencil I made myself, or the Stampers Anonymous Tim Holtz Mini Set #28 Stencils.
Bone folder (optional, but strongly suggested) A bone folder helps you make sharp folds when you are using cardstock or cardboard. I have found it even helps with aluminum cans. I now use my bone folder to deepen score lines all the time.
A Cutting Machine like a Cricut Maker or Cricut Explore
A hand-held craft blade like an X-Acto knife or Cricut TrueControl Knife. I also have a hand-held knife called the Excel Knife. It is nice in that it uses the cheaper craft blades, but the blade doesn’t work its way loose like the blade in my X-Acto knife often does. You will also need a cutting mat or a glass media mat to cut on.
Metal Edged Ruler with cork backing
An Embossing Machine and folders.

How To Make The Flower Cart

Download the Flower Cart Pattern

Download the Flower Cart pattern from A Cottage in the Forest Library. It is design #83. Don’t forget to unzip it. The pattern is available in multiple formats – as a SVG (scalable vector graphics), DXF (drawing eXchange format), as a studio3 file for Silhouette, or PDF file. I now include a 1″ square in with all of my SVG files. Scale the pattern so that the square is 1″ to make the flower cart in the size it was designed. Of course the wonderful thing about SVG files is that you can easily scale them to make your flower cart whatever size you would like.

Import the Flower Cart into Design Software and Cut

As of this blog post, a Cricut Design Space update broke the attached score lines. You will need to go through the pattern in Design Space and change the score lines to Score and then attach them to their object.

Here is a great tutorial from Jennifer Maker’s website on attaching score lines. I have started making all of my score lines red so that you can tell that they are intended to be score lines.

Cut out all of your pieces using my pattern. Since many of the items are very small, the detail may not cut well if you use thicker cardstock. If you find this is the case, you can cut the item out twice using thinner cardstock and glue the pieces together.

Fold the Body of the Cart

Fold the body pieces towards the back or inside (mountain folds). Use the jewelry pliers to grasp and fold the tight folds.

Glue together the body of the flower cart and the shelf.

Slide the shelf into the body of the flower cart from the bottom. Glue in place. I slip the tip of my needle nose glue applicator between the shelf and the body. I glued to the front of the cart first, then the back and the sides.

Glue the rims onto the wheels. Make sturdier cart handles by gluing two pieces together.

Turn over each of the wheels, and glue onto wheel supports, centering the circle into the middle of the wheel.

You can paint stripes on the awning, or panels of colored paper. I glued on striped washi tape. Fold the awning and glue onto the top of the cart.

Glue each of the handles onto the end of the cart.

That’s it! Enjoy adding the Flower Cart to your Holiday Village! I would love to see pictures of your village using the Flower Cart. Please share photos with me by emailing me at Jackie@acottageintheforest.com.