Critter Hotel

My few longtime readers might remember the cardboard skyscraper I made for my son last year based on a project in a book I found at a yardsale: “Woman’s Day Book of Best-Loved Toys & Dolls” published in 1982. Over the last few weeks, we tackled another project from the book, the cardboard apartment building. This time, rather than spend hours and hours measuring and drawing, I scanned the diagrams from the book, enlarged them using Photoshop, printed them on multiple sheets, taped them together, cut out the windows and then traced everything  onto cardboard. OK, so that still took hours, but it did not require tedious measuring. The downside was my cutting was probably a bit less precise, so this building is more wobbly than the skyscraper, which has held up beautifully over the last year.

Once again, I skipped most of the trim and extra embellishments, and I cut some of the windows so they could open and close. Parker painted the whole outside a light gray, then I used a Sharpie to draw the stones. He helped with the shading: a dash of darker gray crayon along the left side and bottom of each brick and a swipe of white paint along the top and right side.  Instead of an elevator like the other building, this one has a trap door and chute. Parker has decided it is a hotel, and our guests so far have included dinosaurs, cats, penguins, horses, and one slightly disgruntled cow.