Wood Houses 101
by Helga Strauss
Our Wood Houses are sooo much fun to play with!
I couldn't resist designing some perfect new embellishments for our Wood Houses: Eco Hearts and Mini Classic Doors. Here I've painted them with acrylic paints and a foam brush. Easy peasy!
When you want to art up one of our Wood Houses, you can start by painting one with acrylic paint. Or you can collage it. Here I decided to collage a Medium Wood House with a Vintage Handwritten Letter. To get the size, I just layed the sheet onto the Wood House and creased the edges with my finger. This gave me guidelines for cutting it out to size.
I played around with vintage papers and ended up adding a bit of map from our Paper Pieces collage sheet and on the bottom, I creased and cut out some Vintage Wallpaper.
I glued the papers on with Crafters Pick Ultimate Glue. But really any white glue should work fine.
The finishing touches were an Eco Chunky Heart that I painted with lime green paint. I also added some love birds. And I added touches of white gesso all around the house to blend the paper edges.
Cute kitty break! Inca says, "I'm so hungry, I could eat a house!" lol.
For this Mini Wood House, I added Vintage Wallpaper - I love the texture of this wallpaper from the 1930s. I also designed a collage sheet for those that wanted a large selection of wallpaper samples. On the edges, I added ephemera from our Paper Pieces collage sheet. I have found that the 1" x 3" size is a perfect size for adding to our Wood Houses.
I added white gesso around all of the edges to blend the papers. And then I glued on a Resin Owl. So cute!
On the back, I painted gesso and wrote in Sharpie: "grateful for you." It's nice to include a personal note on the back of your houses if you're making them as gifts.
For this Mini Wood House with Mini Classic Door, I tore a large strip of animal print from our Lovely Backgrounds collage sheet and pressed it down on the edges to get my cut guidelines. Such a quick and easy way to embellish the sides!
And my, doesn't it look awesome?
Here are a few houses that I'm just starting to work on... so they're in progress. But I wanted to show them to you anyway for a bit of inspiration.
On the far left, I added some Chunky Gears that I painted with acrylic paints to a Medium Wood House. In one of the gears, I added an image and Mini Acrylic Bubble. The background is Vintage Wallpaper. I'm thinking this will turn into a cool steampunk house.
In the middle is a Medium Wood House with one of our Hand Antiqued Resin Owls. I thought he'd look cool sitting on a branch and sporting a crown.
On the far right, who can resist a Mini Classic Door in pink? : ) And I'm thinking a Dynasty Inchie Window or regular Inchie Window would look nice. Will be sure to share these when I finish them.
A village of Wood Houses! Once you make one, you'll be hooked! They're a fun, easy art project for the whole family. And they make such excellent, meaningful gifts! I was thinking about making a collection with places that I want to visit...a dream house collection per se. And someday I want to dig through all of my vacation photos and make a collection of houses celebrating some of the favorite places that I've traveled. So many possibilities with these awesome Wood Houses!