Faux gingerbread, now with texture

With the puzzle houses assembled, it’s time to make them look (sort of) like gingerbread. But first, here are some pictures of my mom’s real gingerbread houses, for context.

The stained glass windows are made from crushed Lifesavers, and the pieces are glued together with melted sugar. Note the open doors. As a wee lass I apparently went down a row of finished houses and closed the doors one by one.

Back to the fakes. I painted a base coat of my Glidden Spiced Gingerbread and then filled in the slots to make them less noticeable. (Yeah, I should have done that *before* painting…)

I wasn’t quite sure what to do with this door. I thought I could glue the door slightly open, like on the real houses, but that leaves some gaps that would be hard to fill in. Just seemed kind of sloppy.

I ended up putting the piece I’d punched out of the doorway back in. I can still glue in a door that’s ajar, but it’ll look neater this way. The windows aren’t punched out so it isn’t weird that the door isn’t punched out either.

Time for texture! Gina of the More Minis blog made a Greenleaf Buttercup kit into a gingerbread house and I’ve been reading through her posts to get ideas. She textured hers by mixing stucco mix into paint. I don’t have any stucco mix on hand, but I have some “sanded grout” which seems like sort of the same thing. I poured some into a cup.

This stuff is dusty! It’s also about ten years old, and has a lot of clumps in it which I broke up with my fingers.

Next added a few spoonfuls of paint, and mixed it up with a coffee stirrer (not with the spoon, because I wanted to be able to dip that back in the paint without getting grout in the paint container).

I applied this to the house with a paintbrush that’s probably going to be ruined by the end of this. The earlier step of filling in the slots with wood filler was probably unnecessary, since this paint mixture is so gloppy. It fills in the un-punched-out windows more than I wanted, but my plan is to go around those with “icing” to make them stand out.

Here’s how it looked once the paint dried. The lighting in the garage is awful so I had to move it into the house to get a decent picture.

It doesn’t really look like a cookie, but it doesn’t look like painted wood anymore either. I probably could have trial-and-errored my way to a more realistic finish but this is just a quick fun project, it doesn’t need to be perfect. I’m hoping that once the fake candy is on, your brain will say “of course, that’s a cookie!” and not “why does that cookie look like stucco?”

I’ve only painted/textured this one house so far. Once the other one’s done they’ll be ready for candy!