Happy Sunday!

I hope you all had a wonderful week, like me... except for this tiny accident that happened...

I fell over our IKEA lamp's cord, it fell and...broke into a million pieces (I bet there will be little shards coming from under furniture even after a year...) We of course replaced it, but were left with a not so pretty broken base, and since it's weekend, we decided to make something out of it!

Our first idea was to make a haunted house, so when you light it up, there would be shady characters behind the windows doing all kinds of creepy stuff - but since there's no real halloween where we live, and I would be creepedout too much when waking up at night looking at the house, we agreed on making a gingerbread house out of a cardboard shoe box we had lying around. :)

Let's see how it all happened!

(a slight warning: not all of my photos are for my liking, but I hope you can forgive that! :) )

Step 1: Getting the Supplies...

It was an entirely out of the blue weekend project, so we used things we had at home (and I'm pretty sure everyone has them who has a crafty corner)

Full list of things we used:

a shoe box
measuring tape
pencil
ruler
scissors
x-acto knife
(sandpaper - not on the photo, but we ended up using it to make the cuts cleaner)
paint, paintbrush, water
tape (if you have a glue gun that is even better for connecting the edges!)
copy paper

Starring: our broken light! You can see a star quality photo about it as well!

Step 2: Measuring, Marking, Cutting the Base

Fold out your box, and you will get this amazing big surface you can draw your design on! We decided that we would do a cozy tall house instead of a smaller, wider one, like the ones you can see in the mountains (with the pointy top, so the snow falls off).

After we made up our minds, we measured our broken lamp's base, and ended up using the box's natural folding as guides. On the above photo you can see our measurements in cms and inches, but in case it doesn't load, here are the detailed measurements:

Longer side: 20 cm / 7.87 inches

Shorter side: 12 cm / 4.72 inches

(Half of shorter side, where the pointy part will be: 6 cm / 2.36 inches)

Height without roof: 15 cm / 5.90 inches

Height with roof: 23.5 cm / 9.25 inches

Roof details (not on the photo)

Roof long side: 21.5 cm / 8.46 inches

Roof short side: 12 cm / 4.72 inches

Step 3: Cutting the Windows

(I know, I know, on the photo I already painted some parts... I was really not happy with the original photo, haha)

This is where the real freestyle and fun starts! :)

I freehand drawn the windows and the door, BUT you can use tiny objects to make more precise lines.

After marking my way for the cutting, I used x-acto knife for cutting out the shapes. If you accept an advice, it is easier to cut in the 'valleys', it drives the knife really nicely. Don't worry too much about messy edges, you can just grab a piece of sandpaper to make it smoother, like how we did it. :)

Step 4: Painting a Design

This is the best part of this little tutorial! :)

I really enjoyed decorating my house, even if you can't really paint, you can't go wrong with making scallops, hearts and blobs of whites around windows. Don't forget about the icing dripping from the edges either! :)

I don't know if it's lucky or not, my white paint seems it's too old (even though I bought it just a week ago or so, it was an old stock it seems), so I had to use extra water to make it a bit runny - it really started to look like real icing! I kind of like this effect of half covering - half not :)

Step 5: About the Roof...

The original idea, how we cut the roof was not something we liked, so we made this design from the short side of the shoe box. It is literally the short side just folded outwards, and it almost perfectly matches our roof as well - we especially liked the little hole on the top, it emits a bit more light this way! :)

If you don't have this piece, you can just glue 2 pieces together - see the measurements above!

Step 6: Making the Light Cozy

At this point, you could start assembling it, if you want the windows open, or that the house emits clear shapes of the windows, but we wanted something subtle and cozy, like how a moodlight you would want :)

So we took our regular printer copy paper and made shapes that are covering the windows and simply (and precisely, of course!) taped them to the inside of the house.

Step 7: Assembling Your Piece

First and foremost: if you have a glue gun, you will have less trouble making your house seamless!

We actually cut off around 3-5 mms of the bottom part, where you can see, that it still shows that the box was folded.

We used tape in the inside of the house to keep it together, and it worked pretty well. Assembling the base is quite easy, since you just have to glue the two edges together.

Putting the roof on it a bit trickier - while holding it upside down, making sure it fits as much as possible, glue the place where the roof meets the base.

Or in our case, we used tape where you can see it in the image above :)

Step 8: Where a Thank You Is Due...

Thank you guys for following along on this tutorial once more! I know it's not a traditional 'autumn' project, but I still hope you enjoyed this project, even though it didn't turn out to be a haunted house. :)

Don't keep your lovely thoughts to yourself, I would love to hear your feedback! :) Leave a comment here or pop in to my blog to see more of my ideas, designs and pretty collections.

Have a nice, creative weekend!