crooked house

Little Cabin Clings to Side of Building

This little cabin hanging off the side of a building in SF is an art installation. I wish it were actually, you know, a little cabin with someone curled up beside a tiny woodstove inside it. Via The Hairpin.

Miss Suzy Teaches Us to Love Squirrels

We got the best present in the mail today from our dear friend ee. It seems she read about our recent squirrel fiasco and so decided to send us one of her favourite books when she was a little girl -- Miss Suzy. Written by Miriam Young and illustrated by Arnold Lobel, it tells the story of a little grey  squirrel who gets chased out of her treetop home by a band of marauding red squirrels. So Miss Suzy gets into the attic of a dilapidated old house and takes up residence in a charming dollhouse she finds there. She discovers five toy soldiers in a box, who move into the dollhouse with her in a kind of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves situation. She looks after them through the long winter and then, in return, they chase the gang of red squirrels out of her beloved treetop home in the spring. Thank you, ee! Miss Suzy is teaching us to love squirrels, the sweet little grey ones, anyway. (Ours was red.) 

Someone will read the story to you on youtube.

The Crooked House Paper Village

Here's a shot of the paper village we always put up around this time of year. Some of the houses -- the three-dimensional ones with pastel roofs -- I made a year or two ago using a Martha Stewart winter village kit. At some point, I used Country Home's plans to make the plain white buildings, which are flat. And this year's addition is the one in the middle  -- it's made from a photograph of our own crooked house, printed on vellum and taped to a square glass vase. I got the idea from Hutch Studio. They made similar ones of their shop. (Via the lovely new blog A History of Home.)

I've taken photographs of other houses in our neighbourhood, and ones of the houses of some relatives and friends -- you know, the people who don't actually live in our neighbourhood but we wish did. (Gramma, when you read this, please email us a photo of your house and Den's.) And, time permitting, I'm going to add those houses to our paper village, too. So that even if the real world isn't perfect, our paper one will be.

Or maybe not. If you look closely, you can see where the roof of our porch is starting to fall down, right above the steps. And unfortunately, there's another slight problem. I suggested to Luke that we might like to put little cut-out photographs/paper dolls of him and Vivi on the felt, next to that snowman say, and he thought that was a great idea. "We should look sad, though," he said.

"Why?" I asked.

"Because the house is on fire," he said. And unfortunately, it does look a little like that. Luke thinks the glossiness of the map behind the roof of the house even looks like smoke.

We could just go with that, I suppose. Add a toy fire truck and all.

 

All you need to make your own is a photograph of your house printed on a sheet of vellum, a battery-operated tea light or two (whatever you do, don't use real ones), and some tape. The glass vase or candle-holder is optional. If you don't want to use one, just fold the photo of your house in a kind of tube around a tea-light and fasten it with the tape.

An Even More Crooked House

This little crooked house, which is even more crooked than our crooked house, is on the grounds of the Indianapolis Arts Center. I found it on pinterest.

Here's a pretty photo of it after it has been weathered grey.

Lighted Cardboard Tower of Crooked Houses

This is one of artist Annalise Rees's cardboard cities. It's on our list to reproduce -- it may be a good activity for Boxing Day!

Tellus Nursery School

This is the sky as seen from the courtyard of the Tellus nursery school in Stockholm. Click through for more photos. Via Evan Sharp on Pinterest.

Walk Around the Block with the Hipstamatic

This is a house around the corner -- I think of it as the extremely straight house, as opposed to our crooked one. It always looks so tidy and never more so than at Christmas time, when it has matching wreaths on every window and large floodlights to show it off at night. All the photos in the post were taken with the Hipstamatic for the iPhone, which I am loving.

A different Christmassy house in the neighbourhood, a different setting on the Hipstamatic.

Luke tells me he prefers "coloured lights and animals" to our bland white lights. This is down the street from us.

Someone's front door display. They have a huge sign that says GREETINGS above the door, which didn't show up.

Another house in the 'hood, a really big one.

Luke and I and his orange monkey.

The two final shots are of our front door -- I can't tell you what Hipstamatic settings these are because by the end of the walk my fingers were freezing and I was just shaking the iPhone to randomly change them.

Book Rest Lamp

Swoon. There's only one book rest lamp left. Quick, go buy it for me for Christmas.

Modern House Lamps, House Ornaments, and House Storage Boxes

All available from my house party. There's something appealingly  Christmassy about them but you could use them all year round, too.

Pop-Up Holiday Cards

Paper village pop up holiday cards.

Sweet shop pop up holiday cards.

They also have pop up Christmas trees, snowmen, skaters, stained glass ornaments, doves and more, most of them by paper artist Robert Sabuda, who incidentally offers instructions for making a variety of pop up cards on his site. The Christmas tree is supposed to be good for beginners.