May Bird Abode

Have you seen Laura Denison's Bird Abodes?  She has a series of patterns (and is creating more) for bird houses which she calls "Bird Abodes".  You can see them on her website, Following the Paper Trail, and get the patterns to make your own at her store.

This is my version of her May bird house.  I followed along pretty much with her pattern, but added a few of my own touches - windows, window flower boxes and a chimney.

I used paper from a variety of collections and leftovers from other projects.  Most of the flowers are from the Tim Holtz Sizzix die, Tattered Floral Garland, although I did have a few flower punches that I used.

The fence is chipboard cut with Tim's On the Fence die.  I painted it white but that was too stark, so I used a Copic marker and a brush with Ranger Alcohol Ink Blending Solution to give it the "purple-washed" look.  I used this same technique for all the window frames.  The windows were cut with two sizes of Sizzix Mover and Shapers dies that each had four squares.

I cut the roof a little small in error so I added the purple punched trim.  The beige paper I used for the top section was a little too plain so I added a purple punched border all along the edge of that section.

I thought the big windows on the sides were a little plain so I made three sided boxes out of chipboard, covered them with pattern paper and some punched trim and had some window boxes.  I snipped some long pieces of green paper to make grass and then added the flowers.

The trickiest part was adding the chimney.  Of course I had the bird house all put together when I decided it would be nice to have the chimney.  It has some very interesting angles where it joins the roof line - each of the four sides is different.  I figured out the pattern by taking a one inch cube and adding pieces of wire to each of the corners.  I held the cube level and plumb and adjusted each of the wires until it touched the roof.  By measuring the length of each of the wires I was able to construct a pattern.  It is made from patterned paper and I added tabs to join it to the roof and a chipboard square in the center to give it stability.  I added flowers to the top of the roof just like I did for the window boxes.

The roof comes off to expose the interior of the house.

Inside are five tags.  They each fold in the center and are simply decorated with patterned paper and more flowers.  There was kind of a large blank space on the inside right of the tag so I used a Martha Stewart edge punch (Floral and cut out a motif to fill in that space.

I enjoyed making this project, but I need a break from flowers!  There were so many in this project and then it was not too long ago that I made the Exploding Flower Pot - that's a lot of flowers.!!