Gingerbread House - Card or Gift Card Holder - .gypsy or .cut files available - George Cartridge Used

Hello.  Hope everyone in the US had a great Thanksgiving.  We did.  We had 28-30 people to our house to eat on Thanksgiving.  That means I spent all the earlier part of the week cleaning my house!  LOL  Then about half of them were back on Friday for leftovers!!  So - I just finally got around to posting this today!

Here is the "GingerBread" House Card that I made last week.  I found it while perusing an old copy of  a PaperCrafts magazine. It was in the November, 2007 edition on page 45 entitled, "So Good You Could Eat It" and was designed by Valerie Pingree.  When I saw it I thought - "hmm . . . . that is cute and would be very easy to do in Design Studio and/or the Gypsy."  I designed my original file on my Gypsy with the George cartridge.  I used the Gypsy so I could "group" and easily resize if needed.  I used the George cartridge for two reasons.  First, like BugBytes - I think my Gypsy Wanderings shapes are wonky for some reason - at least they look that way on my screeen!!  Then, I wanted to be able to share this file with people who didn't have the Gypsy but did have Design Studio so I went with George.  If you don't have George, you can use the template option on the Gypsy to recreate the file using another cartridge with basic shapes you do have. DS doesn't have the "template" option but you can still recreate it in DS with another cartridge simply by using another "page" and the preview mode to allow you to do the same thing like the template mode on the Gypsy. You can also leave me a comment if you need help recreating this file with another cartridge on either the Gypsy or DS and can't do it yourself and I will be happy to try and help you.

Both files, the .gypsy and the .cut, have 2 pages.  The first page is the house card base.  Cut it out in any brown or tan cardstock that you want.  You will want it to be fairly heavy cardstock.  Once cut, fold the left and right "flaps" in to overlap the card base.The 2nd page is the "snow scallop" for the bottom of the card and then the 2 roof scallops.  Note that the circles are welded together but the rectangles are not welded to the circles.  This is correct as you simply want the rectangle to cut the circles so that they are "flat" on that side for placement on the roof line or the base of the card.  The first scallop is only 4 circles - this is for the "snow" on the base of the card.  Once you have it - cut it in half to put half on the bottom of one "flap" of the card and the other half on the other flap of the card so that you can still open the card. The other two longer "scallops" are for the roof "shingles".  They overlap on the peak of the rooftop.  I used stickles for the red "dots" on the roof line.  You could also add small circle cuts to each circle (without welding) and they would cut the "dots" out.  You cold then add paper to the back to get a different color "dot".

The file doesn't include any other "decorations".  The candy "circles" in the middle of my roof is cut from paper I had and then stickled.  I also stickled the snow and roof shingles.  I used my crop-a-dile to add two eyelets on the "flaps" to run the ribbon through.  The ribbon is some I had in my stash.  Create and decorate as you would any Gingerbread house - the limits are your imagination.

To simply use this as a card, write your greeting inside. You could add a small piece of colored cardstock inside to write on if you wanted a little more color inside.  If you want to use it as a "gift card" holder, you can either simply add a little repostitionable glue to the back of your gift card and place it inside on the card base or cut some "slits" for the corners of the gift card to slide into.  I think I am going to use it for my niece who is moving to NC to her first real job and apt. just before Christmas.  As always, I love to read comments and see what people do with my files.  I'm happy to answer any questions as well.  Hope everyone has a Joyous Holiday Season!

You can download the .cut file using George for Design Studio or you can download the .gypsy file using George on the Gypsy.