Here's a shot of the house at Christmas. Not over the top fancy but it did win an "honorable mention" in the community contest.
Here's a shot of the house at Christmas. Not over the top fancy but it did win an "honorable mention" in the community contest.
I spent quite a bit of time in '95 creating this toy shop placed over the front door. I can't take credit for the artwork, it's based on a full size template that I traced and cut out. I did, however, have to do the somewhat tedious panting. You can buy the patterns from The Winfield Collection. I can't find a web site for them but you can order a catalog by calling 1-800-Winfield.
This Santa and elves is based on a similar template. It stands about 9 feet. Again, it required a lot of tight tolerance panting. Poor Santa still has a ways to go to reach the top of the chimney but somehow he finds a way Christmas night. In painting these, I generally masked each color with 2" masking tape and then cut along the line with an exacto knife. This allowed me to get a clean edge but I often had to wait for one color to dry before masking and painting the next. That stretched production over several days. Once I had all of the colors painted, I used a black magic marker to trace between the colors. This covered any irregularity between the colors.
This is what I call my claim to fame. This is my illuminated car wreath. It consist of an inexpensive wire wreath (about $4 at most craft stores) with about 30 lights on it. 
The lights have been re-wired to work on the 12 volt car battery. This is accomplished by taking 100 light sets and breaking them down into short strings. Most 100 light sets actually consist of two separate 50 light circuits. Each bulb actually requires 2-3 volts but when wired in series can be plugged into a 110 volt outlet (2.5 volts X 50 lights = 125 volt circuit). If you shorten the string to only 5 lights, you can run off a 12 volt source (2.5 volts X 5 lights = 12.5 volts). You can then wire several of these short strings together in parallel to achieve the desired effect. I found that if I break the set into sets of 10 lights and tap in with the 12 volts in the middle, I get two series strings of 5 lights neatly wired together in parallel. A set of 30 lights wired this way only draws about 1 amp of current. I use stiff wire to attach the wreath to the car grill or front license plate mount and wire it to one of the front parking lights.
In '99, I built these two raindeer and sleigh. Cutting things out went quickly but there's a lot of surface to paint -- luckly all one color! These paterns came from Wood Magazine out of Des Moines Iowa.