The Jolly Christmas Houses of Jingle Lane

Now that Halloween has passed, it's time for (you guessed it!) Christmas crafts. I love these new houses from Alpha Stamps; they are so easy to put together, and really fun to decorate. Using 8x8 papers from Authentique, I made a couple of jolly Christmas houses. In this post, I'll show you three fun ways to use them during the holidays. First up: a little Christmas scene. Add a few bottle brush trees and a tiny Santa, and ho, ho, ho- let's visit Jingle Lane!

Here's number 24. Green and red striped candy canes flank the front entrance, and Christmas lights adorn the roof. The doors and windows have tissue paper behind them, so the houses look lovely with a small battery operated tea light inside.

Number 25 Jingle Lane has a beaded swag outlining their roof and a cookie cutter star for decoration. Candy pieces look like flowers under the windows.

Another fun thing about this house is that the roof opens up. I decorated a 2" cube box (perfect for holding jewelry, sweets, or other tiny gift items). It fits perfectly in the house. Two gifts in one!

The ribbon is tied under the flap of the gift box, so it doesn't need to be untied to open the box. This is great for people like me, who love to reuse pretty boxes.

Here's a third option for displaying the houses: tie a long ribbon to the clip, and hang them. They're so pretty with the lights inside. I'll talk a bit about the doors and windows and how that glow is achieved below.

Festive!

Here are a few tips on assembling and altering these sweet houses. Below you can see the walls of the house are covered with scrapbook paper, and the roofs have not been covered. Before I covered them, I folded down the overhang part of the roof and glued it with white glue. Clip it closed while drying. If you are looking at the outside of your house (below), you would put your glue on the other side of the overhang to make the flap.

The houses have windows cut into the front and back already, but I wanted to use some Mini House Doors and Windows because they're so fun. Some of these have different sized openings than the windows that are already cut into the house, so here's how to make those work:  cover all the sides of the house with paper, then place the door and windows where you want them. Don't glue them down yet! First, lightly trace around the opening inside the windows on the new windows or door, then using an x-acto knife, cut a little outside the pencil lines. In the photo below, I have just peeled off the paper, so you can see the where precut window is. I then cut through and removed the cardboard before finally gluing down the door.

Once the new windows are cut out, take some tissue paper and glue it around the opening, so the candle light will diffuse. This is the inside of the house, so no need to be too neat with the paper. In the photo below, the new windows and door have already been glued on the outside, so you do see the mullions in the windows.

Assemble the house, glue it up, and you've got some jolly Christmas houses to help celebrate the season. Enjoy!

For a complete list of supplies, click here!

Junior Vampires

Here's a quick little project I did for fun this week: a couple of junior vampires, resting in their coffins. Each of the boys is snugly tucked in.

When you pull them out, you get a little of an idea of what you're working with here.  Eek! "Ghostly"!

If you pull them all the way out, you can see how they're made. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with these; maybe I'll send them off in the mail as a Halloween greeting.

Need Halloween supplies? Click here!

Haunted Duplex

Double your fun! I took two Alpha Stamps chipboard haunted houses and put them together to create a haunted duplex. These houses were identical, so I cut out one of the towers on the house on the left to create a different roof line. Then, I had a great time mixing and matching Halloween papers and adding spooky accessories. Chipboard gates, doors, and window frames, along with Dresden trim and flying bats, give the duplex dimension. The houses are attached at the back with a strip of washi tape.

Every year the residents of the duplex try to outdo each other in decorating. They do love Halloween! The skeletons, who live on the left, enjoy a nice banquet on the big day. Looks like their youngest has been out trick or treating.

Witches reside in the other half of this duplex. Most of them are probably out on their broomsticks, but someone has to stay home and watch for trick or treaters. I believe they'd rather be out riding.

Some of my favorite details on the skeleton house: a flag made from a small image. The flag pole is some thin wire with a seed bead at the top. The bats are attached with foam tape so they almost look like they're flying. A couple of skeletons peer out of the attic window.

Also at the skeleton house, a brad makes the perfect doorknob. The smallest skeleton inspects the candy in his trick or treat bucket. Striped paper helps create the illusion of stairs.

Over at the witches: more bats, and a friendly ghost. The ghost's head is glued behind the tower, but the hands are glued in front, giving him a nice 3D look. The pointy spire has an orange bead at the point.  To attach it, I used wire clippers to shorten a straight pin, then put a dab of glue on the tip and carefully pushed it into the cardboard.

More striped paper for the steps, and bat decor on the doorway. That poor witch looks like she's so bored.

The bat on the door is a charm. Usually when I use a charm like this, I clip the ring off. I was just about to clip this one off when I noticed it was in the perfect place for a peephole. I found a tiny eye on a collage sheet image, and glued it behind the charm. Someone is watching you!

These houses look great with all my Halloween decor. For a complete list of supplies, click here. Happy Halloween!

Pink Flamingos!

I recently participated in an altered tin swap on Craftster.org. My partner listed a few themes she would like, and I thought it would be fun to do pink flamingos. I picked some fun papers and some fun trims and here's what I whipped up.

I found the tiny flamingos on etsy. The were solid pink, so I added a little paint to make them more detailed. I couldn't resist adding glitter around the edge of the tin.

The grass came from a little square of astroturf I've had forever. I just knew that would come in handy some day. And that trim! That and the glitter just add to the kitschy goodness. The stand and the finial were painted and then glazed to make them shiny.

Some kitschy paper on the back, and done!

Circus Town

A friend of mine recently introduced me to feves, and I'm not sure how I feel about that; once I saw them, I had to purchase some. If you are unfamiliar with feves, they are small trinkets hidden in a king cake or similar dessert. You know, like the plastic babies you can buy at the party store. BUT, the feves my friend introduced to me are no plastic babies: they are porcelain feves from France. There are all sorts of feves to be found on etsy: animals, kitchen accessories,  and cartoon characters, just to name a few. I found a set that is circus themed and it was all over. They are mine.

Of course I need a way to display them, so I looked to Alpha Stamps and found the cutest little houses, perfect to make a circus town! They also had the perfect paper needed to decorate the houses: "The Greatest Show" 6 x 6 pad. It's gorgeous! I had fun mixing and matching the papers on each of the houses. For scale, the tallest house in the center is 3 1/4" tall, minus the flag.

Some closeups. Look at those little porcelain beauties!

I fussy cut some of the elements from the papers: the ball in the clown house, the pennants, and all the circus posters.

And, the backs. Circus Town is the perfect place for all my new feves to live. For a list of Alpha Stamps supplies used, click here.

Halloween At The Cemetery, a Candle Holder

More Halloween! This month, Alpha Stamps sent me some small reliquaries. What to do, what to do? I'm not sure what made me think of making a candle holder, but now that it's done, I'm glad I did. This will be such fun to add to the mantle this year. *Note, to avoid any sort of fire hazard, I'll be sure to only use a battery operated candle in this holder.

I painted all the tombstones with a mixture of paints (tutorial at the bottom of this post) and added papers, charms, rub on type, and collage sheet images to create five different tombstones. This little graveyard is littered with pumpkins, a witch's broom, and bones that were snapped off of a plastic skeleton. It's pretty easy to just break those bones off at the joints.

Here lies Edgar Allan Poe.  I used rub on type to indicate the year of his death, and for the RIP written on the gravestone to the right. To make the bats fly, I used a thin wire and literally just shoved it into the rubber bodies of the bats (poor things!). The wire was sandwiched between the two pieces of chipboard before gluing the gravestones together. Clothespins were used to hold the pieces tight while drying.

A black cat, a giant crow, and more bones. So spooky! I wrapped the candle with a black mesh ribbon before placing it into the holder.

I love the sentiment on this final tombstone: "Gather ye blossoms while ye may."

I made the base for the candle holder from corrugated cardboard. I used a large can to trace around a circle, and cut two of those out using an x-acto knife. Glue these together to make a thicker piece This will elevate the candle and give the tombstones something to lean against. Glue this double thick base to another piece of cardboard.

You can make the base any shape you want; I elected to make mine a larger circle. Cut that shape out with an x-acto knife, and you are ready to go. I added a little moss to help hold my tombstones in place, then glued them to the inner circle with a glue gun. Most of the other elements, like the bones and pumpkins, were also attached with the hot glue.

For a complete list of supplies, click here. Spooky Halloween!

Halloween Tunnel Book

It's never too early to craft for Halloween, and now that it's August, be prepared to see a lot more spooky stuff! When I saw this 6" x 6" tunnel book, I just knew it was time to bring out the scary. Enter if you dare...

When it's closed, you can see through all the layers to the back of the book. I added lots of fun Halloween things, from a jack o'lantern, an articulated skeleton, a curious rat, and a skull and crossbones. There's even a ferocious lion door knocker! Once I had it all assembled, it looked like it needed more color, so I added an orange bunting. It's so easy to make: just glue little triangles to a piece of thread, and hang.

Let's open it up! On page one, we visit the undertaker's, which features a couple of tombstones and what appears to be a forgotten casket. Someone tried to decorate a bit by putting out some jack o'lanterns. The iron door is actually sold as a window, but with the addition of the street number and the knocker, it makes quite a presentable door.

On this next page, a couple of skeletons frolic on Halloween night. When I covered the page on the right with scrapbook paper, I left the branches that ran across the opening of the window.

Here's the final page. The book kit comes with one last page with a smaller window, but I liked the the size of the second to the last window, which perfectly framed the image of that tortured soul, so my book stops here. The sign says, "At twelve o'clock on Halloween, many strange things can be seen." Looking at what lurks out of this poor guy's window, I think I'd agree.

He doesn't seem very happy, does he? Perhaps he's just resigned to his fate on this All Hallow's Eve.

I cut out tons of images from collage sheets, and spent quite a bit of time moving them all around until I was happy with each page. It was like working a great fun Halloween puzzle. I used my handy BindItAll to add the wire binding to this book. Are you in need of spooky supplies? Click here to find nearly everything I used for this project. And happy haunting!