Make Your Own Wishing Well

This year I hope to add more village accessories to my library of free patterns. Making houses are fun, but it is always the little details of the accessories that can go with each house, or between them, that ties a village together. I have had occasion recently to repeatedly pass a house with a wishing well in the front yard. I thought one would look cute in my village

While researching dimensions of wishing wells, I found they vary greatly. You may want to make your wishing well larger or smaller.

This Is How You Make The Wishing Well

Size of the finished wishing well in S Scale will be approximately 1 3/8″ W x 1″ D x 1 3/4″ H.

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The Wishing Well Specific Materials

My free pattern for the Wishing Well from the A Cottage in the Forest Library. Design #91. Get the password for free by filling out the form at the bottom of this page.
Optional: Lawn Fawn Light Brown Woodgrain Cardstock. I have used this in several of my designs, anywhere I want a wood grain. If I hadn’t bought it, I could have used Kraft colored Cardstock and a wood grain texture folder to make my own.

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 Wishing Well

Download the Wishing Well Pattern

Download the Wishing Well pattern from A Cottage in the Forest Library. It is design #91. 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 Wishing Well in 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 Wishing Well 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.

Make The Wishing Well

Fold each of the wishing well pieces on their score lines. I cut double of the wishing well roof supports and crank arm and glued them together to make them stronger. I did the same with the well rim.

If you are going to texture your pieces or glue on brick or stone paper, do so now. I used I used a stencil and texture past to add a stone facade to my well. You can find a tutorial on h ow to use grit paste here.

Glue the larger well piece together with the stone facade on the outside, and the smaller well piece together with the stone facade on the inside.

Glue the smaller well piece inside the larger one, overlapping the. I turned it upside down and held down with a little force until the glue set. Glue the well rim onto the top of the well.

You have three choice for gluing the well roof support onto the well. You can glue them onto the outside of the well (left) or glue them onto the inside of the well (right)

Or you can cut off the bottom of the well roof support to your desired height and glue them onto the top of the well rim. This is the method I used. I threaded the crank arm through the holes in each of the well roof support pieces before gluing the supports onto the rim. The crank arm was a bit tight so I used pliers to flatten it a little.

Glue the roof onto the top of the supports. You can shingle the roof if you prefer. On one side of the supports I glued the crank arm down to the support. On the other side I folded it down to mimic a crank arm and snipped off the excess.

You can make a bucket and add to your wishing well if you desire. I just glued together a rectangular scrap of my woodgrain cardstock and threaded a string through both sides and glued it to the top of the crank arm.

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