DT Post - Leigh's Haunted Wonky Cat Houses

Happy Halloween Joggles Fans!

Leigh here to get you into the spirit of the season with a trio of spooktacular Haunted Wonky Cat Houses!

For my tutorial today I’m showcasing three of Joggles Wonky wooden houses. Joggles has 8 different houses in various shapes and sizes to choose from and the ones I’m demoing today are #2, #4 and #7. I’m also featuring some gorgeous Giftsland Lokta hand made paper from the assorted Copper pack. Joggles has 8 different packs that range from florals to geometrics in a wonderful selection of patterns and colours. Each assortment pack contains twelve 8.5” x 11” sheets and you get 2 of each design so you’ve got lots to play with.

Last month, I encouraged you to look at your rubber stamps with fresh eyes by using images for something other than what they were originally intended. For example, I transformed a large Leaf into a Hot Air Balloon. This month, I challenge you to take your “every day” stamps and make them work for specific holidays like Halloween. For today’s project I’ve used a large Laurel Burch stamp of a whole group of precious kitties and I’ve turned them into Halloween cats plus I also show you how much fun it is to create lots of smaller designs from one single large stamp!

This project is quite involved but so much fun so lets get started, shall we ;0)

Materials and Supplies:

Joggles Wonky Wood Houses: #2, #4 and #7

Giftsland Lokta Paper Assortment – Copper

Laurel Burch Cling Stamp – Whiskers

Joggles Cling Mounted Rubber Stamps: Halloween Pumpkin with Hat; Scared Pumpkin; Joggles/Virginia England – The Zombie Hopper; Joggles/Bloobel – Spider #1;

Joggles Stencils: 9 x 12 Gears;

Joggles Itty Bitty ATC Stencil – Mini Cyclone

Tim Holtz Distress Stain – Black Soot

Tim Holtz Distress Ink Pads: Black Soot; Tea Dye

Tim Holtz Distress Oxide Ink Pads: Fired Brick; Fossilized Amber; Antique Linen; Peeled Paint; Spiced Marmalade; Wild Honey;

Inkssentials Mini Mister and water

Strathmore Mixed Media Paper

Gelly Roll Metallic Pen – Copper

Black Micron Pigma Pen

Inkssentials NonStick Craft Sheet

Ranger Heat It Craft Tool

Aleene’s Fast Grab Tacky Glue

Other: Brilliance Ink – Cosmic Copper; Memento Ink – Tuxedo Black; Neenah solar white cardstock; black cardstock; Lifestyle Crafts assorted window dies; Martha Stewart punch – Drips; Copic markers; Viva Pearl Pen – Copper; Prismacolor marker – black; pencil; ruler; scissors; craft knife; painter’s tape (low tack tape); paper towel; Copper Sharpie marker

Start off by staining the wood houses with Black Soot Distress Stain. I like to do this step to give the project a “finished” look once completed. I only stained the edges of all the sides because the rest of the wood will be covered with paper but there’s nothing wrong with full coverage if you’d prefer.

The front facades of each house are decorated with patterned cardstock created with Tim Holtz Distress Oxides and then stenciled with a pattern. I started off by randomly applying 6 Distress Oxide Inks directly onto a sheet of mixed media cardstock (watercolour paper will work too).

Generously spritz the inked cardstock with water and let it bleed and run and do it’s thing and then dry the cardstock with a heat tool.

Press and drag the dry cardstock onto any drips left behind on the NonStick Craft Sheet to add some extra texture and patterns. Dry the cardstock when you’re done playing ;0)

Use the wood houses as templates and decide where you want to cut the panels from.

Turn over the cardstock and trace the shapes onto the back in pencil. Tip: I numbered the wood houses when I removed the packaging and then numbered the corresponding panels so I’d know which piece belonged to each house.

Pencil in “cut lines” about 1/16th of an inch from the original lines to ensure the panels don’t cover the entire front of each house and lets the nice black Distress Stained edges show.

Cut out each panel with scissors. Loving how the panels look so far!

I decided to add some subtle pattern to the panels in Distress Tea Dye and chose a gears design…just coz I felt like it. I’m a huge Steampunk fan ;0) You can add whatever pattern you like or just leave it with the yummy Distress Oxide pattern. That’s the beauty of creating; just do whatever speaks to you!

Here’s a closer look at the gears stenciling…I love it!

I’ve mentioned before how I like to add a touch of black or brown to the edges of panels to “finish” it and also give a grungy or aged look. Here I’ve used Black Soot Distress Ink to tie in with the stained houses.

Now its time to give each house some windows and doors. I’ve got a fun set of dies that cuts openings and leaves some sides perforated to create flaps, so cool! You can use regular square dies to cut windows and even make your own openings with flaps using a craft knife and a bone folder.

Apply Black Soot Distress Ink to all the flaps with a foam applicator. Tip: It’s much easier to do this by turning the panel over and folding the flaps in…you won’t accidentally get any black ink on the decorated sides this way.

Decorate each window and door flap with Joggles Itty Bitty ATC Mini Cyclone Stencil design done in Cosmic Copper Brilliance ink. The areas are so small I just used a piece of scrunched up paper towel to apply the ink.

Outline all the openings with a black marker.

Adhere scrumptious “blood drip” windowsills to all the windows punched from black cardstock.

Now we’re moving on to the rubber stamping part of the project. Stamp all the images onto your favorite cardstock for alcohol markers with Memento Tuxedo Black ink.

Colour all the images with Copics in shades of Fall/Autumn and Halloween. Fussy cut them all out leaving a narrow white border. Adhere them to black cardstock and fussy cut out again leaving a narrow black border. This fussy cutting technique helps strengthen any flimsy parts of the design, gives the stamped images a finished look, and also makes them pop nicely against the background.

Next, stamp the Laurel Burch cats out twice and use the window/door cut outs in the panels to decide which parts of the design you’d like to use. Then trace the shapes onto the stamped images in pencil.

Don’t cut the cat panels out along those lines though, you need to add a bit of an overlap so the panels can be glued to the window openings. Colour all the cats in shades of yellow, orange, and black with green eyes.

Now we’re going back to the front panels of the houses. Before we can add the cat panels to the windows and doors, its time to decorate the inside of each window flap too! I covered them with small pieces of the gorgeous Lokta paper…more about that a few steps from now!

Adhere the cat panels to all the openings with Aleene’s Fast Grab glue. In the 2nd photo, you’ll see I used a different Lokta paper on some of the flaps.

The next few steps are to decorate the remaining sides of the houses. I chose three different gorgeous Lokta papers from the Copper pack. The one with tall thin lines was perfect for the narrow lower side panels of the all 3 houses. Use each house as a template and trace the sides directly onto the back of the Lokta paper in pencil. Subtract a 1/16th of an inch from each panel and then cut them out with scissors. Just like before, I made the panels smaller than the houses so the stained edges would show.

I used the scrumptious black and copper floral paper for the roof of 2 of the houses and the matching design in cream and copper for the roof of the 3rd house. Now you know why I used the two different papers on the inside flaps of the windows and doors. Black roof houses got cream shutters and the cream house got black shutters. Adhere all the Lokta paper panels, except the front roof panels, to the houses.

Now adhere all the window panels to the house fronts and then add the front roof panels last so that they overlap the top of the window panels.

I then punched out “blood drips” trim from both the black and cream Lokta paper and, alternating the colours again, I adhered the trim to the lower edge of each roof panel.

I then added architectural touches to the front of the houses with dimensional copper paint. More roof trim, window panes and door handles finished everything off nicely.

Once I saw the cats surrounded by all the house details I decided they needed some touches of copper, too. I used a copper gel pen and Sharpie marker to add some whisker dots and patterns. I also used a black pen to enhance some details earlier when I first coloured the cats as well.

The final step is to adhere all the stamped images to each house and voila, you’ve got a spooktacular trio of Haunted Wonky Cat Houses! The spider isn’t attached so he can move freely from house to house just like spiders do. I’m glad my local spiders aren’t that big…eeeeek!