Don't you just love how your creativity is at it's greatest when your pocketbook is at it's lightest? A lack of funds ALWAYS pumps my creative juices.
And this was the case at Christmas time some twenty years ago. The year was 1990, and it was my first Christmas after graduating college and moving out on my own. Somehow I was surviving on minimum wage, so money for Christmas gifts for family was non-existent. From this serious absence of cash flow, one of the Greatest Christmas presents ever (in my opinion) was Created.
For my parents, I made this model of the house I grew up in - entirely out of paper.
I don't recall what kind of paper I used, but it was probably drawing or watercolor paper. Either of those would have been what I would have had on hand. I constructed the shape of our 1970's tri-level home, and used glue (probably rubber cement) to hold it all together. Then, using colored pencils, I added as many details as possible. To give the entire vignette a feel of depth and dimension, I also added landscaping. I cut out shapes, colored them accordingly, and glued them on, independent of the house structure, to really give it a 3-D look.
Some of the details on the front of house I captured were our three window wood front door with the painted red concrete planter next to it, in which Mom always grew red geraniums. Even though it's not visible in this photo, there is also the watering hose that hung on a rack to the right of the garage door.
And if you could look down from above, you could see the sidewalk that is behind the row of yellow hyacinth - complete with the imprints of mine and my sister's hands.
The East side of our house was the garage and had an all bricked exterior. At the front corner, there was a large flower bed, built up on railroad ties, where our flagpole was located.
The back of the house was probably my favorite. It showed a lot of important details, like the sliding glass door, which lead out from the Dining room. We NEVER used this door which is probably why a deck or patio was never built - there were just the stacked cinder blocks for the steps to the ground.
Probably the most important detail was the dinner bell, which was atop a pole at the back corner of the back stoop. In the warm weather months, this bell was rung pretty much every evening, to let my sister and I know, from wherever we were in the neighborhood, that it was time to come home for dinner.
The West side of our house was pretty plain, but in the Blizzard of 1976, we had a snowdrift as high as those second story windows.
I lived in this house from the time I was a toddler until my parents sold it my Sophomore year ofcollege, and I have many, many, many Wonderful Memories from growing up there.
Since receiving this inexpensive, but Special Christmas Gift from me twenty years ago, my parents have had a plexiglass box made. In this box it is stored and displayed, and kept on a bookshelf in their living room.
Thank you Mom, for taking the time yesterday to take these pictures of it for me.
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