So a few years ago I designed a pattern for a glitter house styled after my own house. I got the scale down to under 4.5 inches. The printed pattern fits on two letter-size sheets of thin cardstock. Since I didn’t have a Glowforge back then I had to cut it out by hand with an exacto and a magnifier. It took ages, but I love my tiny house. It sits on the mantle at Christmas.
Fast forward to current times: since I got my Glowforge, I decided to use the same house pattern I created to cut another kit. While I was setting up the file for the glowforge, I wondered if I could shrink the pattern down to an “ornament” sized house. After a little tweaking, I was able to fit the entire pattern onto a half-letter size sheet of card stock. The Glowforge scores and cuts the tiniest details, producing a micro pattern of my house that when assembled is just under 2.5” tall!
Here’s prototype no. 1 on a full sheet on the forge:
I used 105 lb Stardream Metallic stock. It’s plenty thick, good quality and can take a deep score without coming apart (important when bending gluetabs the size of a grain of rice). Comes in a good variety of colors. Hopefully they continue to make this paper. I may make other micro houses for friends and neighbors. So it was back to a magnifier and tweezers to assemble this house, which used less than two drops of glue.
Anyhow…
This is a photo of my real house decked out for our neighborhood’s late summer lantern festival. While assembling my wee Glowforge house, I decided to hang “lanterns” from the porch. To give you an idea how tiny this is, the lanterns are 4mm opalescent glass beads on the thinnest wire headpins I could find.
Like his bigger brother, this micro house has peach vellum windowpanes, and a mini button-battery light for glowing windows.
I haven’t decided if I want to make a version with cardstock colors to match my house paint colors or if I want to try to tweak the pattern a bit more to get closer in accuracy. For now, I’m considering painting this little one, coating with glitter, or maybe just leaving as is.
