le petite tour eiffel by lauren bergold

as a proud pixie, i spend a fair amount of my crafty time thinking up inspiring projects on which to use the fabulous kits miss kirsty puts together, such as this month's LA DOLCE VITA, but i'll warn you right now, this particular project is anything but practical!!!


yes, it's an uber-frilly, totally feminine, eiffel tower birdhouse!!! do you need one of these? probably not. would you have a complete and total blast making one?? well, i certainly did!!! :)

first i should mention that the birdhouse itself, which is just over 10" tall and sits on a 7x7" base, was originally of unadorned light wood and came from michaels' seasonal department. i think i may have squealed out loud when i saw it. :) before i go into the details of the project i will, as usual, quite boringly say that the key to polished-looking 3-D altered projects which involve patterened paper is to start by making a template. mine was cut from ordinary copier paper, with one piece for each of the three sections of the birdhouse, and looked like this:

trust me, when you have four sides to cover on an oddly shaped item, and perhaps only a limited amount of supplies to use, this step is well worth doing! i also gave the base, the top, and all the edges of the wooden birdhouse (in other words, only the parts that would show) a quick coat of white acrylic craft paint. and then it was time for THE FUN PART: paper and embellishments!!!

the perfectly coordinated selection of papers--and the fact that they are all double-sided--made covering the house really easy! i've got sassafras, glitz, pink paislee and american crafts on there, and even a little bit of packaging from the girls' paperie flowers in the kit, too!

i happen to like inked edges, generally, but also, this is a great way to tie a lot of different patterns together, and a great way to hide any small imperfections there might be where your surfaces meet. for adhering paper to wood i like to use a dry glue. a tombow mono adhesive runner works great for small areas; on a project this size the xyron is more cost-effective. for the small punched borders which trim the three "levels" of the birdhouse, my top tip is to xyron the strip and then use the border punch on it, to save having bits of "extra" adhesive in the small holes of the pattern!

after all my paper pieces were firmly attached, it was time for embellies. i used a swirly pink paislee artisan element sticker to make a feature of the "front door", and scattered the sweet tiny recollections rosebuds around the house in little clusters. from my paper scraps i punched several sizes of butterflies to use as an added accent; their pearl centers are the only item not provided, except for the doily sticker at the base, which is a leftover from january's MY FUNKY VALENTINE kit, and trimmed out with the beatiful diecut borders from the sass papers! finally i used my trusty hot glue gun to affix our signature pixie dust seam binding in little ruffles at each horizontal joint.

et voila: a parisian pied a terre in which even the poshest of petite birdies will feel right at home! :)

Kirsty's Note -

WOW!!!! I am speechless with this AWESOME creation!!!! Thanks Pixie Lauren!


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