Wee Country Cottage.

Still obsessing about little houses, so here is another experiment. It didn't start off looking like much, as I wasn't really planning to do what I ended up with.  I used a bit of cardboard that came from some packaging to cut some of the village dwelling house shapes from, cut them up a bit, stuck them together and it just sort of grew into a not quite 3D version of a friend's lovely little cottage.

Because I used striped cardboard, and the patched bits were fairly obvious I covered the lot in texture paste from DecoArts. It clogged up the windows a bit so once it was dry I had to go over each window to clear the excess paste. Neat I am not.

I have forgotten take any further photos of the process. Doh. But what I did was put a layer of gesso all over then painted the stonework with various paints ( American crafts and ranger distress colours). I went on to google street view to get a good idea of what the cottage looks like and tried to stick to that as far as I could.

The window frames are from Tim Holtz village winter die, and I used some frosted paper behind them.

The green plants growing up the walls are made using some fluffy stuff I was given by my sons partner Jill. I think it was originally intended for use on fingernails, but not sure if that's right and NO idea what it is called.

I used vintage photo distress embossing powder to make the gravel at the front of the house. And the doorstep is a small square of grunge board. I coloured this with some distress inks, and also used a distress pen to colour the brick edge. Also a distress blue pen around the Windows.

It wasn't planned that way but the finished cottage fitted perfectly into an IKEA frame. I added a torn paper landscape behind (pretty much the view from the back garden, of Garleton Hill and the Hopetoun monument near Haddington ) and gave it to my friend who was thrilled with it.

I've now got an order from a friend who lives in a thatched cottage with dormer Windows. I think I will have to wait for Tim's new village dwelling release, which has a dormer window die, before tackling that one.