Flying Unicorn September KOM - Vintage Harmony OTP project

When the Flying Unicorn kit of the month arrives on the CT's doorstep, the kit's contents are a complete surprise.  Alda, and each of the CT members in turn, keep their lips tightly sealed about what's inside. I'm second-to-last to receive mine, and I sit on pins and needles as I read each CT member's reaction to the kit contents.  The OTP is what causes me the most angst, as it really stretches my creativity, but when I pulled this month's OTP out of the box I was all smiles.  Now if only I could translate the vision in my head of a Cape Cod-style beach house onto the adorable papier mache house in the kit.

Midway through this project I was cursing myself for being too ambitious, and if I were doing it again there are some things I would do differently, but I'm thrilled with how it turned out.

I started by painting the main part of the house with white acrylic paint and the roof with black since I wasn't sure how much would show through once I got going.  In the end, only the small section along the edge of the roof and underneath the roofline are visible LOL.

I started with the roof, drawing bricks onto a red paper scrap from Glitz's Love Games paper using a pencil and adhering it around the chimney.  I then set to work on the roof, cutting 1/2 strips of paper from Basic Grey's Little Black Dress line.  I then cut 3/4 of the way through the strips at regular intervals to create the texture of shingles.  I laid them from the bottom upward so that they would overlap properly, and did each section of roof separately.

I chose a piece of Easy Breezy paper for the siding of my house, and coated the entire sheet with Picket Fence Distress Stain to give it a whitewashed appearance.  I then cut the sheet into 3/16" strips, and cut these into random lengths for my boards, then wiped Distress Ink in Weathered Wood across the edges of each one.  I adhered these with white glue; the glue that seeped out reacted with the Distress Ink, spreading the ink around and giving it the delightfully aged look I was going for.

Now here is where I wasted a lot of time.  Fitting tiny little strips of paper around and between the 48 window openings was long, finicky work.  Once I was done I could not find a way to do the window trims that wasn't too bulky for my design, so I ended up covering the whole thing up.  You can see in the photo below that each window had four little openings for the panes; I punched out 1 1/2" squares of white cardstock, which I edged in Weathered Wood, and 1 1/4" squares of black cardstock which I coated with Picket Fence Distress Stain to give it some texture, like reflective glass.

I wanted faux stonework for the foundation of the house, but didn't have any paper that looked like stone, so I set out to create my own.  I chose a piece of patterned paper called "Bliss" from Donna Salazar's Botanique line.  As you can see, it looks nothing like stone, but it had the colors I was after.

 

I used a pencil to draw in random stone shapes, the traced between them with a white poster pen to imitate mortar.  What do you think?  I think it turned out pretty well, if I do say so myself.

And here it is on the house.  For the door I used another scrap of the Love Games paper, covered it with Picket Fence, and drew in the outline of boards using a warm grey Copic marker.

A beach house wouldn't be complete without sand, so I added some Fran-tage in Taupe to finish things off.

 Thanks for stopping by!

Jackie