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Posts Tagged ‘paper model’

Still in Fairy Tale Land

Posted in altered art, ephemera, inspiration, vintage toy, tagged , , , , , on August 10, 2016| Leave a Comment »

This week I’m visiting with Little Red Riding Hood courtesy of Agence Eureka. If you are not familiar with that totally awesome blog you should click the link and check it out. It is emphera heaven!

chaperon2.0

chaperon1.0

This particular entry is a Toy Theatre. How cool is that?

chaperon3.0

And here is a diagram showing how to put it together. You’ll need some cardboard to make the box that serves as a surround, cereal or cracker boxes will work. Use a wire or a bamboo skewer as a handle for the figures. Or pipe cleaners or whatever else you have handy. Remember the important thing is to Have Some Fun!

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Spending some time with Hansel and Gretel

Posted in altered art, book, doll house, ephemera, illustration, puppet, vintage toy, tagged , , , , on July 27, 2016| Leave a Comment »

I’ve been thinking about fairy tales a lot lately. No real reason, just something about the hot weather I guess.

Maybe it’s the heat that makes me long for cool breezes off the lake, in the shade of big, big trees. Which leads me to Hansel and Gretel. I mean, who hasn’t wanted a secret little get-away cottage in the deep dark forest? Especially one made of food.

Hansel and Gretel House

So this one is also a paper model. With an oven. Which you could use to make s’mores or a roast turkey or some cookies to make a matching wishing well. Bonus, it has a weirdo looking paper doll Gretel with some spare clothes.

Hansel and Gretel outside the Witch's House

This house has a gingerbread rooster roof ornament, pretzels trim and almond cookie quoins on the corner of the house. Plus a twisty tree and that not quite a fence of pretzels and almond cookies.

Hansel Gretel - Voodoo gingerbread house

Similar to the last one this house has voodoo face cookies, people cookies, a bunny cookie and check out the snake in the lower right left. As in your other right.

hansel-and-gretel - anton pieck

I love the curvy organic-ness of this house by Anton Pieck, I really like his illustration style — you should do a google image search of him.

Hansel and Gretel puppet book

This puppet book with a house of real cookies and candy is kinda jokey but I still like it.

vegetable house

And lastly, this is not a Hansel and Gretel house but maybe you could think of it as a green healthy alternative.

 

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A Lovely Piece of Paper Engineering

Posted in ephemera, illustration, tagged , on December 18, 2013| Leave a Comment »

Did anyone else get this card? Because J did. Not me, just J.

WHpopup

Here’s what I really like about this card:

First, it’s a popup and I like popups. Second, whoever designed this made some particularly smart decisions that elevated it from being just an elegant iconic piece of architecture to being something a bit more, well, friendly. These are the elements that made that happen: the dogs and the windows. The windows are stamped in gold foil which makes them catch and reflect light; warm golden light which feels nice. The dogs are . . . dogs, and dogs are inherently a friendly sort of symbol.

Overall this card said to me: “Hey, we got another dog (oh yeah and we live in the White House), Merry Christmas!

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New Hermes Printable Bags

Posted in accessory, altered art, ephemera, tagged , on June 6, 2012| 2 Comments »

For those of you who missed out on the Hermes Kelly bag printables (no longer available); take heart. Hermes has issued a new collection of printables.

Hermes clutch bag printables

Really adorable! Five fun designs and a blank for you to decorate yourself. I wanted to wait until I had printed out a few and played with them but a nasty headache has intervened.

So go here and download your own copies — now! Past history indicates that these won’t be available for very long so go download the files today even if you know you won’t be able to play with them for a while. Hint: click on “I want it” to get a window with the pdf file then save it to your computer; repeat for each bag design you like.

If you really want a Kelly bag; try this blog post. Coquette has kindly put a blank template with assembly instructions of the Kelly on her blog.

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Toys You Can Make Yourself

Posted in book, doll, doll house, illustration, tagged , , , , , , , , on June 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

dustjacket

This optimistically titled book is from my small (but distinguished) collection of vintage craft books. It was published in England in (guessing) the 1930s or 40s (it’s not dated). It contains instructions, diagrams and patterns for an large number of toys of amazing diversity of subject matter. My copy even still has the full size pattern sheet which was loosely inserted into the book.

table of contents

What a gem. You could populate an entire nursery with just projects from this book. Which given the toy shortages of the time (due to the economy and the war) was rather a necessity. The soft toys are either knitted or sewn fabric/felt, oddly there are no crocheted toys. The wood toys include a section on reed basketry and the metal toys (and other toys) includes paper/card models and crafts.

But there is another reason I bought this book and here it is:

endpaper

Fantastic illustrated endpapers! Virtually every single thing in the illustration is a project from the book. Who knew the hula girl’s boyfriend was a dog? That a monkey could be a fireman? That penguins are allowed on the bus? My very most favorite bit is Punch wreaking havoc with the crane and spilling milk all over the poor Golly, while Judy wisely makes discreetly for the exit.

Overall an entirely delightful window into the past. And terribly useful to boot.

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Paper Model Dollhouse

Posted in doll house, ephemera, tagged , , on September 29, 2010| 3 Comments »

This is a trial run of a little paper dollhouse that is made of ink-jet printouts fused to cracker and cereal box cardboard. The files were sent to me by Esben (a very generous toy theatre fan) from Denmark. The dollhouse was originally published in Illustretet Family Journal in the first part of the 20th century. This was a Danish magazine that included a great many paper models including some fantastic toy theatres. Since this is just a trial I shrank all the parts down to fit on 8-1/2 x 11 paper and didn’t pay strict attention to scale. The house turned out to be around 1/24 scale (1/2″ to the foot). Even at this size I can easily fit my hand into the attic to arrange the furniture and a friends six year old had no trouble at all playing with the house.

The house is designed to come apart into two pieces — voila! the attic comes off. I particularly love the wallpaper  and wainscoting in the attic.

The parquet floor and french doors in the downstairs room are rather elegant, and the little portraits and sconces are lovely.

The attention to detail carries over into the furniture. Notice the woodgraining on the bedroom set (and the mattress ticking on that bed). Downstairs the table cloth does overhang the table legs all the way around (the legs are inset about 1/8″) and the designer included a piano!

The furniture is only partially cut out — those little white spaces in the chair  and table legs should normally have been trimmed but this was only a test. I printed the furniture sheets on plain white cardstock and didn’t fuse any reinforcement. They are surprisingly sturdy.

The actual assembly went smoothly, all the parts were well designed and fit together as they should. The only problem I had was that I should have just used plain card stock for the attic dormers. The cardboard was a bit too thick and made fitting them very fiddley. Also next time I would cut out the window panes; it’s too dark in that attic. It would be great fun to do this project again on a slightly larger scale and make little dolls to live in it.

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