Becoming a house builder - for Spellbinders/Spellbloggers

I had such fun making these little houses - I wanted to make them as Christmas houses, so added snow to the roof and gardens......find the Build a House  die HERE

I used small dies from other die sets for some accents - the circle on this next house is the dial from the phone in the HELLO die set, I thought it made an interesting architectural feature!

For this next house, I used corrugated card for the roof, dry brushed with white acrylic paint and given a scattering of flower soft white 'snow. The wreath on the door is a flower center from the month 7 die of the month club set (I punched a hole in the middle of the die cut to make a wreath, and added red perfect pearls berries). The brick pattern on the walls was inked through a stencil

This next one had a brick stencil inked onto the walls, the roof was given some texture with an old embossing folder I had. The little banner was cut from the Flight 2 die set......It was fun altering the details so that the houses looked different - for instance, I drew a line down the center of the door in this one, to turn it into an imposing double door entrance

You can leave one side of the roof free, so that it can be opened to take a LED tealight, but I found this impossible to photograph, you will get the idea if you watch Yana's video (link below)

I had a lot of inspiration from watching a video made by Yana Smakula with her version of these houses - watch it HERE I especially liked her idea of cutting windows and doors out of fun foam to give dimension, and using vellum behind the windows, which I did on all my houses

The ridiculous thing was that I found myself being quite obsessive about the details of these houses, the colours had to complement each other, and the picket fences all had to be white (hey, I'm the CEO of this homeowners association, I make the rules......). I also found myself worrying that if I put the fences across the fronts of the houses, the little people living in there wouldn't be able to get out of their gardens to take the little dog for a walk - I know, nuts!