Happy BBTB2 Monday! This week's challenge cut at BBTB2 was selected by me and it is the Haunted House cut(s) on the Happy Haunting cartridge. The other designers are probably disparaging my name after cutting and assembling this adorable house; it was a bit of a challenge. There are A LOT of cuts needed to create the haunted house, but I think the end result is well worth the effort. The house has a place of honor on my coffee table.
I set up my cut file in Design Studio, cutting the house and all of the house elements at 7 inches. If you choose seven inches, the cuts will just fit on a regular 12 x 12 cutting mat. Only two colors of cardstock were utilized, black and yellow. The yellow window cuts on the cartridge are great in that they are grouped on two keys. The grouping makes it so that you never use more than one color of cardstock at a time on the cutting mat. And where the cutting of the house is very easy, the assembling does take a while.
I love the way this house is assembled. I especially like that although it was cut at seven inches tall, the addition of the fireplace chimney and the widow's walk on top of the house add extra height. Although this house was cut at seven inches, it "towers" to a finished height of twelve inches.
While the house itself is adorable (in a cool spooky way, of course), I added a few additional finishing touches to my haunted house. When I set up my design studio file I selected the section of fence on Happy Hauntings and welded several lengths of fence together. I created five rows of welded fences, enough to go around the edges of a 12 x 12 sheet of cardstock, my planned "yard". I also cut the spooky 3-D tree from the HH cartridge (again at seven inches) to add a bit of fun to the yard area (see the photo below).
If you look at the photo above you will see round glittered roof shingles (photo above). The shingles are not part of the cartridge house cuts. I used a 3/4 inch circle punch to create the shiny shingled roof. It was tedious, but again the results were fabulous. I did not cover the entire roof, but covered sections and used the circles as gingerbread-type trim in other areas.
The final elements that I added to give the house my personal touch were the moon and witch cuts and the ghost. I added the ghost to the widow's walk area of the house. The moon and witch were glued together and then wired to the chimney. The last two things I did to this project was to affix the house & fence to a 12 x 12 sheet of cardstock and add touches of purple Stickles to the house, birds and tree limbs.
Overall I really like my finished project. My name may be mud with the other design team members, but I bet they are loving their haunted houses too. Please do consider playing along with us and post a link to your project at the BBTB2 website.
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