Hanging lamps made

Today I made the little lamps that hang from the corners of the eaves on the roof. They weren't easy because they were so small.

You were supposed to cut tiny pieces of wood to make the little crosses on each side. After doing that on some of the other lamps in this house, and seeing how difficult it is to work with pieces that tiny, I decided to use something else.

I have a Spellbinders Grand Calibur die cutting and embossing machine for my card making, so I decided to look and see which dies had a pattern that would replicate the cross on each side of the lamps. I found one, and used that instead of tiny pieces of wood. The embossed die cuts are raised up, and don't look flat like they would if I had just painted them on. Making 26 of those out of paper was a lot better than cutting and gluing 24 tiny vertical sticks, and 48 even tinier horizontal sticks would have been! Some of the crosses aren't completely straight, but in person, they are so small that it is difficult to tell that, and they are much straighter than they would have been if I had made them in wood.

The leg things on each corner were also difficult to glue because there is so little surface area to glue them to, but they could have been worse.

The next part that was difficult was gluing the little knob thing at the top, where the chain attaches. There is almost no surface area there, on either the roof, or the knob things, so after a few hours of struggling, I used little balls of Fimo, and stuck those on the roof, and stuck the bottom end of the knob thing in that. I used my heat gun to cure the Fimo.

Just before I came home from work, I drilled tiny holes in the beams of the roof, where they will hang. I used my Dremel and flexible shaft for that, and it didn't take long at all. Hopefully I will get them installed tomorrow!