As I’ve mentioned before, I loved making things from paper when I was young, and the cut-out and paste crafts, which usually came in activity/coloring books in the 1950s, were some of my favorites.
These particular houses were published as a series in the Sunday edition of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1934, and were illustrated by E. R. Higgins. The Sunday paper contained around 125 pages, and in addition to the usual news, also included a large women’s section, fiction, and a 6-page supplement entitled “Junior Eagle” with puzzles, games and crafts.
The fold-up house series lasted 15 weeks, and I will post the rest as I clean them up. The originals, of course, were black ink on newsprint, but I changed them to sepia since I wanted to print them on some tan parchment card stock left over from Emily’s wedding. You could change them to grayscale in a photo editing program, or just print them in black ink.
The directions call for pasting the newsprint on thick paper or thin cardboard, but it’s much easier to just print the images on card stock. The houses go together quickly, and I think it’s clever the way the illustrator used chimneys and awnings as tabs; the corner building and the curved roof house are also unusual. Although the houses took up the same amount of space in the paper each week, you can see that they are not all drawn to the same scale. I tried to change the sizes of the images so they print a little more to scale. My houses were printed landscape mode on legal-sized card stock (click on images until they are full-sized).
This week I hope to have an apron completed for the May apron giveaway. Also, I’m finishing up the hand quilting on a large quilt, so hopefully something quilt-related to show soon.
UPDATE: Click here for the remaining 12 fold-up houses.
