My parents came to visit last weekend, and gingerbread houses were on the agenda! Here’s what we started with (read the earlier posts here and here to see how I got the houses to this point). I already built a puzzle house like the one on the left, so my mom decorated that one and I decorated the three story Victorian.

I don’t plan to decorate the inside of mine, but I finished them so they wouldn’t look bad from the back. The Spiced Gingerbread paint sample was just enough paint to do these two houses.

If you’re wondering, these puzzle houses are roughly half scale, but they aren’t the same scale as each other. Here are the staircases next to each other — you can see that the three story Victorian is a bit smaller in scale than the other house.

Here’s a real gingerbread cookie in front of one of the houses. The paint color is pretty close!

We started by organizing all the fake candy in a muffin tin. I bought this candy at Michaels the Friday before Thanksgiving, at which time the store was well stocked. We went back this past Monday (December 14) and they were completely out of this stuff. If you’re thinking of doing a project like this, buy your candy early!

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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.

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