Wooden Birdhouse Cottage

Make crafts for outdoor decorations - it's an inexpensive way to make your garden shine during the summer. Create a Wooden Birdhouse Cottage from Heidi Borchers that you can hang on your porch and display all season long. It's both pretty and rustic.

Materials:

Aleene’s Super Thick Tacky Glue
Craft sticks
Craft knife and ruler
Wire cutters
Toothpick
Wooden mini birdhouse
Plastic fairy
Acrylic paint – black, white, brown
Paint brush (fine tip and 1/2″ shader)
Sheet moss
Silk flowers

Instructions:

Use ruler and pencil to draw straight lines from birdhouse opening to bottom. Use craft knife to score/cut along pattern lines. It is best to use a sharp craft knife for this step so that it will cleanly cut through the wood.
If needed, use pliers to pull cut piece from birdhouse.
Continue to pull away cut piece and do not worry if it does not come out completely clean. You will be gluing craft sticks over the cut edges.
Using your sharp craft knife, you should be able to cut away a section that looks like this.
For an added effect of the look of wood, I glued craft sticks to the outside of the birdhouse. Mark, measure and cut your craft sticks with wire cutters.
In this step, I have cut and glued three craft sticks to the front right. You can see how the craft sticks slightly cover the opening so if you have any rough cut edges, you can see how the craft sticks will cover them. I like to apply the Aleene’s Super Thick Tacky glue to the back of my craft sticks with a toothpick.
For the roof detail, I cut varied lengths of craft sticks and glued them to the rooftop.
To create a weathered wood look, use a fine brush to paint black along the edges of the craft sticks. Let dry. Paint with a white wash of white. I also used my Aleene’s Super Thick Tacky Glue to glue pieces of moss over sections of the roof.
You can also glue several pieces of craft sticks together to create a “Fairy Cottage” sign. I used a black permanent marker for the lettering and I painted it with the same white wash.
Paint rope hanger brown. For a pretty touch on your Fairy Cottage, glue silk flowers over the moss.