Make Your Own Rose Arbor

When I designed my Rose Cottage pattern several months ago, I knew I wanted to decorate it with climbing roses. At the time, I only had a few rose bushes, but I found a package of rose vines on Amazon. Even though they say HO Scale, I actually think they are perfect for the S Scale I use to make my village.

The package comes with 6 rose vines, 3 red and 3 pink. I used one of them to climb up the side of the building on the trellis from my Greenhouse Accessories. I got the idea from Donna Camacho’s version of Rose Cottage. I hadn’t even remembered that I had made a trellis!

I decided to make a Rose Arbor and fence to use two more of the rose vines. Of course I have already decided that I would like to make another house with a wisteria covered arbor. So far I haven’t found anything in the right scale. I will probably need to learn how to make my own wisteria.

This Is How You Make the Rose Arbor

Size of the finished rose arbor in S Scale will be approximately 1 15/16″ W x 1″ D x 2 1/4″ H.

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The Rose Arbor Specific Materials

My free pattern for the Rose Arbor from the A Cottage in the Forest Library. Design #88. Get the password for free by filling out the form at the bottom of this page.
Miniature climbing roses

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 Rose Arbor

Download the Rose Arbor Pattern

Download the Rose Arbor pattern from A Cottage in the Forest Library. It is design #88. 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 rose arborin the size it was designed. Of course the wonderful thing about SVG files is that you can easily scale them to make your rose arbor whatever size you would like.

Import the Rose Arbor 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.

Fold the Body of the Rose Arbor

Fold the rose arbor along the score lines. Glue a spacer bar inside each of the top posts of the arbor.

Glue the 2nd top post of the arbor on the inside on top of each spacer bar. Glue the arbor side seam together.

Glue the top lattice pieces together to make them double thick. Glue onto the top of the arbor.

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