{pinterest challenge: little houses}

The Pinterest Challenge is back! The idea: to take an idea you've pinned, and make it a reality. Last time, a blurry shot from a room set became a giant canvas. This time, I'm working on a smaller scale...

Inspired by all the miniature clay houses on my Little Houses board, I picked up a few packs of Sculptey on sale, and a jar of enamel paint. How hard can it be to make a pointy square?

Turns out, not hard at all, with the help of a steak knife and a rolling pin. The difficult thing was preventing crumbling. As you can see, lots of my houses have that chalky rubble-sort-of-look of a thousand-year-old Danish church.

Spread out across a map, it was just like looking across the fields in Jutland as we drove across Denmark this summer, seeing spire after spire poking out of the trees. (Just pretend it's not a map of Japan, where, I'm sure, mini skyscrapers would be much more appropriate)

A bit of stamping...

...and we're red-dy to write our own little house messages. I'm playing with the idea of an advent town -- twenty-four houses, stamped with the numbers 1 through to 24, one of which will appear each evening as Christmas grows near.

P.S. Bonus Pinterest Challenge also completed: to use a map, somehow, anyhow. Since Sophie kindly sent in the antique French map, I've bought a hand-drawn map of Bungay in Suffolk, been given the Japanese map above by my Dad, and a map of Bahrain by Justin. Now, to put them to use!