The mice are in the house!
Idea
Mice are a recurring theme. They first appeared in November 2016 in “When the cat’s away…the mice will PLAY!” card. I had wanted to do something with swiss cheese for a while. Originally I was thinking about a cat with a mouse inside the cheese. After playing around with some ideas, I came up with an apartment building made of cheese.
Design
This is a 180° card that uses one mechanism, the asymmetrical parallel fold (FS8) repeated six times, and Building Technique 2, sticking pieces on. The main part of the apartment building on the main fold, lifts up the “wing” on either side . It is made up of one piece of cardstock with one fold and the edges glued parallel to the main fold. Since the piece’s fold isn’t in its center, you get the asymmetrical part of the name. Each “wing” of the building is the same mechanism, only instead of on the main fold, they are on the folds created by the primary mechanism. Carefully measuring was required to get the front of the wings to be parallel to the base, and the sides parallel to the main mechanism.
A particular tricky part of this build is the three nested pieces inside the windows. They can’t be just smaller versions of the outer ones since they won’t fold right. It only took a couple tries to get a working prototype on a smaller scale.
You would be greatly impressed at my cutting of all those perfect circles, if I did it by hand. Instead they were all cut out by my friendly Silhouette. The nested pieces are a bit shorter on the wings so they don’t show as much, but the main one goes to the top to support the roof-top volleyball game. I had 14 holes to fill and had to come up with 14 mouse activities. My final list was:
- Reading a book
- At a computer
- On a treadmill
- Peeking through blinds
- Looking out of curtains
- Eating
- Two mice drinking wine
- Hugging mice
- Cooking
- Listening to music
- Putting on makeup at a dressing table
- Watering flowers
- Looking out with binoculars
- A black cat
Cover
For the cover, I used pastels sprinkled on through a kitchen strainer, then smudged around with my fingers. The speech balloon was printed on paper and applied to the front. The mouse was drawn by hand on paper, cut out by hand and applied.
Pro Tip! Always do the cover before putting any mechanisms on the inside. Otherwise when rubbing anything down or drawing, you won’t have a flat surface and it will leave marks.
Build
- 9” x 6”
- Silhouette Cameo to cut the circles and the speech balloon on the cover.
- The base is Strathmore 300 Bristol 100lb, with pastel backgrounds and hand-torn paper.
- The building is yellow cardstock.
- To avoid extra thickness, the nested pieces are yellow paper.