Read the previous post - covering the floor - here.

Once the floors had been covered, I moved on to making the buildings. Note that I didn’t attach the top floor to the second one just yet. I waited until all the buildings were made before doing that.

My first building was to be the house. Since I knew that was going to be easy, I started to draw out an idea on the card (the same stuff as I used for the floors). I wanted something futuristic, and went for a round ‘mushroom’ shape. Originally, I had painted it red with sponged orange, but it came out looking too much like a mushroom. Instead I substituted purple, but left the red and yellow detailing. The house needed windows, so I cut out four; it also needed hinged doors, so I did that too - using a material hinge idea that Jeany had used for Sticky Ballerina Legs on our big doll’s house. The idea behind it is that you attach a piece of thin material to the underside of the house, and then attach the other end to the front of the door. Attach another piece just above/below, this time from the underside of the door to the front of the house. It makes the hinge action work perfectly, and is quite strong.

Here you can see the house fitted into it’s slot. Because there needed to be a gap for the door, there are two slots, and the bottom left of the house fits into one, the bottom right fitting into the other. As you can see, the ‘lip’ notion mentioned in a previous chapter means that the fitting is invisible (especially with the grass).

One of the blinds of the window needed to be manipulated, so for three of the windows, I glued some green material behind it. On the fourth one (shown at right), I only attached it at the top. At the back of the blind, I attached a rod, which bent the right way and attached into the backdrop, allowed for it to be moved from stage right to stage left (and up a little), revealing an empty window.

You can see that the house is placed somewhat downstage of the back of the box; this would allow the loving couple to be ‘hidden’ behind the doors, and then enter through the doors and move towards downstage. And even though you can’t see it here, there are two cuts in the grass in front of the house to allow the flowers to ‘grow’.

Read the next post - making the trees - here.