blue and cream Putz house

I so like the way this blue and cream Putz house turned out that I may have to keep it for my own collection.

I love the combination of colors. The blue is Apple Barrel 20716 Pool Blue. The cream color is Apple Barrel 20505E Antique White. The colors do darken a bit when painted. I don’t know if that’s because I add white glue and sand to the paint or not. You can see in this picture that the blue on the bottle cap is lighter than the blue of the house. It is very evident in person.

In case you’re wondering why I put a dab of paint on the lid of the paint bottle… They are stored in a drawer and when I open it, I can easily find just the color I want. The row at the bottom is glitter. I also put the color on the glitter lids. If there’s no color on top, it’s white. The Mason jar with the zinc lid is my jar of white sand that I add to the paint for texture. This is a file drawer, so it’s deep enough to store most of my Omnigrid rulers on the side (at the top of the picture).

Currently I am working at my downstairs craft desk instead of in the upstairs craft room. Up there, I have a huge drawer full of paint. These are just the ones I’ve used downstairs on projects in the past few months. When I open either drawer, it is so much easier to grab the right color when they are all painted on top the bottle lid! A real time saver.

Back to the blue and cream house! This is the paper mock-up of the pattern. I like to do this before I begin cutting a new pattern from poster board. It shows me if there are any problems that need to be fixed, if the pattern is marked correctly and if the proportion is correct. I make a copy of my master pattern (on regular printer paper) and use that to make the house. If you look at the addition on the left, you can see that the window isn’t centered. I fixed that on my master pattern.

Then it’s cut from poster board. I use a light weight poster board that is available at Walmart. The roof is not glued down yet. I paint the roof and the house separately and glue them together when dry.

This is the kind of poster board I like. You can see in the picture that I also use other kinds of cardboard. Cookie, cracker and cereal boxes are a great weight. But my preference is the white poster board. That’s probably due to my tendency to be obsessed with details. I want it to be “just right.” Sometimes that’s good…sometimes, not so much!

The pieces of the Putz house have been painted and are ready to glue together. I like to use the flaps of cardboard boxes to cover my cutting mat while I’m painting. I use them over and over till they are so full of sandy paint that I can’t stand it any longer. Then I pitch them and start fresh. Using a cardboard piece allows me to leave the wet pieces on the board and move them elsewhere to dry so I can work on something else. Really helpful when I’m working on several Putz houses at one time.

You might note in the above picture that the roof pieces are bowed. The wet paint does that to them. Because they are scored on the fold lines, I can fold them when they dry and the bow comes out of them. Not a problem.

Glued together. I must have pitched that well painted cardboard flap… In the background you can see the Christmas card on the bottom of the base for this house. There is a lantern in the picture that matches the cream color on the house.

I use hot glue for a few places, but most often use white glue. Crafter’s Pick is my favorite. It holds so well and dries quickly. I use only this kind when it’s time to put plastic panes over the windows, as you can see in the background. They never pop off. Using Elmer’s, which I do use a lot for other things, I had some pop-off problems now and then. Crafter’s Pick works much better with the plastic window panes.

The next step is to glue the house to the base. Then the snowing fun begins. This house has had the snow placed all around the base of the house. I use hot glue to fix the house to the base. I go all around the base of the house and run a tiny bit up each corner. That helps adhere the house tightly to the base and the snow covers all the glue.

I like to use Aleen’s Glitter Snow. I started with Aleen’s True Snow, then noticed on Amazon that the glitter snow was a bit cheaper. I have to say, it does not glitter. But that’s fine. I add my own glitter to the “snow” before it dries. Other than the glitter it professes to have, it seems to be the same as the True Snow variety.

I store the “snow” in a squeeze bottle which makes it easier for me to use. The bottle came from a cooking/baking supply aisle somewhere. I put the snow in it and then store it upside down in the middle of my old, but wonderful Pampered Chef tool-go-round. Mine has different size compartments which is nice. They call it a tool turn-about now. Did they ever call it a tool-go-round? Maybe I’m disremembering that…anyway, the “snow” doesn’t harden in the bottle and I can squeeze it around the base of the house or on the roof and then use a palette knife to spread it a bit.

The snow on the roof really sets if off, doesn’t it?

Time to glue down the fence. Click this link for a tutorial on making Putz fences.

Click this link for a tutorial for making fence posts.

The house is ready to be embellished. Perhaps some silvery glittered “trees” in the background and a couple of snowy, glittering bottle brush trees in the front yard…we’ll see how that turns out another time.