Decorate Your Home with Calico Craft Parts House Lights - by Claudia

Servus, hi and welcome to my first project for 2019 as a still happy and proud member of the lovely Calico Craft Parts design team!

Winter over here in Vienna (and I not just mean the season in general but the time when everything outside is covered in snow and really earns to be called by that name) mostly starts mid-January (and while I am writing up this post the first tiny snowflakes have begun to fall) - so I love to decorate my home during that darker and colder time of the year with home decoration that adds a bit of lighting to my home and makes it more cosy.

The new gorgeous Town and Countryhouse Kits from Calico Craft Parts are just perfect for this! All you have to do is paint them in a colour you like and add some LED light strings to them.

I have made one and put it on top of our new little (electrical) fireplace in front of my freshly red painted wall. I just love how the red on the house beautifully echoes the red wall! And of course it adds a very cosy and romantic touch to that corner opposite my favourite resting place on our (new) couch ;)

Here's a picture that shows a bit more of my "ensemble".

Actually it took about half an hour to make my little house light. I used the small sized Georgian Style Townhouse kit and an electric 10 LED string light.  

First I drilled two holes for two LED bulbs into the house front (making sure the drill size I chose would match the width of my bulbs) and then another one at the very bottom in the middle of the back panel of the house kit for the electric cable to go in. If you use a battery powered LED light string you can skip that last step and just insert the battery case into the house after you have switched it on as the house has no base panel it sits on. 

I examined if the bulbs fit before I continued with putting together the whole house (just in case I had picked the wrong drill size).

Yep - a perfect match!
So I continued with gluing the little extra pieces for the façade in place (using matte DecoArt Decou-Page and an old detail brush).

Once the glue had dried I put the whole house together with more Decou-Page.

I used a mug to stabilise the side panels of the house until finally the fourth side and the roof were added (which made everything stay at a right angle and in place). To not move the house too much while putting everything together, I put it on a sheet of paper, so I could simply carefully turn the house without having to touch it (so it wouldn't collapse) by just moving the paper instead of the house itself.

As the Decou-Page dries really quickly I could start painting my house only ten minutes later. I used cheap red acrylic crafters paint and a soft brush and made sure to not cover up the door's laser engraved patterns (which works best if you rather dry brush these areas than painting over them with loads of paint on your brush).

I filed a slot for the cable to go in and enforced the opening with a cut to size piece of acetate that I glued in place with superglue.

Finally I added the LED string and inserted the two bulbs into the drilled holes. I added a tiny bit of Decou-Page to these two to prevent them from falling out.

Et voilà! It's as easy as that! And as there are nine different house kits to choose from you can even create a little light house village to light your home with! And these would make for lovely self made Christmas presents as well! ;)

Depending on the angle you look at the house light you will see some of the lights from inside peek out - if you want to avoid that effect, you could glue some tissue paper to the windows' backs before you assemble the house. But the photograph makes the bulbs on the inside look a lot more eye-catching than they really are.

I love my little red house with the lights on! I hope you do too! 

Hugs and happy crafting!

Claudia

xxx