Steampunk Nutcrackers

 These are the newest editions to my Nutcracker collection. They started out as plain, naked nutcrackers, but with a little paint, leather, gears, chain, and ribbon, they have become fancy Steampunk inspired nutcrackers

I had fun getting these guys to look as fancy as they do.

The silvery one was painted with a black pearl acrylic paint and flesh tone paint. His little accent dots, belt, drum and drum sticks were done with an antique gold acrylic.

I used a small piece of red leather on the drum. I ran a piece of brown leather through my embossing machine, using my "gear" embossing plate. I made the spats, his beard, and the uniform stripes out of that leather. I used puff paint for the buttons.

For the other nutcracker I used black, flesh tone, and copper acrylic paints. I embossed the leather as I did for the previous nutcracker.

For his belt, I used a piece of copper chain and attached some funky ribbons, clock hands, keys, and locks to the chain. I used three nailheads to tack the chain in place. I made the gear decoration and glued it on.

This is a close up of the embossed leather.







These are the ornament nutcrackers I painted. I painted them with acrylic paints. I glued a fuzzy ribbon around the bottom of the hats/helmets, as well as the little decorations.

Halloween Houses

This year for the annual Halloween scavenger hunt/party, I gave away little holiday houses for prizes. I took dollar store Christmas Plaster houses and made them Halloween by giving them a couple of coats of paint, cobwebs, moss, and Halloween baubles.

 These are the houses I found. Looking in the local craft store, houses like these were selling for $7-8. So, huzzah for the dollar store.

These houses took a little bit of work because of all of the nooks and crannies unique to each house. Some had a brick-like facade, others were made to look like stone. The roofs were also a little tricky, because of the tiles and overhangs.

I chose several vibrant colors, as well as the requisite grey and black to paint over the houses. Since I wanted to make them Halloween houses, I chose orange, purple, blue, red, black, and grey.

The white patches on the roofs was supposed to resemble snow. To hide the snow I glued either cobwebs or a variety of mosses to the spots, helping to give the houses a fall and aged appearance.

 The Christmas trees and wreaths on the doors were painted over and I glued Halloween trinkets over them.

 I think that they turned out pretty good, and the people that won the prizes liked them as well.

I have seen others painted all one color, like grey, and those are okay too, but I wanted the prize houses to have a bit of fun and flair.