Here's One For The Birds

(Click on any photo to view a larger image.)

I've been on a bit of a birdhouse fad lately. In my last post, I wrote about a birthday card I made with an image of a birdhouse on it. Here I'm featuring some wooden birdhouses that I have painted and embellished to use as home decor in my mountain house.

It seems as if I've been seeing birdhouses all over the place. Well, actually I've always seen them but never paid much attention until recently. The birdhouse motif is a frequent sight on the back roads of upstate New York where they decorate mailboxes, front doors and wreaths. I suppose the allure of country living has given me the birdhouse bug.


Here are photos of the birdhouses I have done to date. The blue and green ones in the center photo were painted last year. (Then they just sat on a shelf in my craft room overlooking my work table, whispering that they wanted some company.) The larger of the two is decorated with paper die cuts that were featured in Part II and Part III of my most popular post, the Cuttlebug Filigree Medallion tutorial, By combining the negative cutout pieces, I created the design on the front and back of this birdhouse. On the sides are the pieces from which the negative spaces were cut. The smaller birdhouse is actually made in 1:1 scale for miniature dollhouses. You can get an idea how small it is by comparing it with the size of the dime in front of it. This house was a little to small to embellish with paint or paper cutouts so I used nail art decals instead. They worked like a charm

The black and red birdhouse at the top also features die cut designs from the very same Cuttlebug die as the blue-mint green house. Here only the tiniest of the cut outs were used to create the black design under the tiny red hearts. The hearts themselves were left over from a project I made for my sister and brother in law's 30th anniversary surprise.

The yellow and green house at bottom is not to be outdone. It also sports decorative die cut flowers with rhinestone centers resting on a delicate vine twining around the outside of the house. The flowers were burnished slightly to cup the petals so they would pop up and have some depth. All of the birdhouses were painted with acrylic paints and sealed with Mod Podge before and after painting.

I still have one more wooden birdhouse on my craft table. I don't know what I'll do with that yet but I'll be sure to show it to you when it's done. Until then, keep crafting!

Ballo ergo sum
- Gitana, the Creative Diva