I built a crooked house.

Have you happened to hear about The Great Tissue Box Challenge challenge?  It's up right now on the beautiful, wicked cool blog Michele Made Me.  The challenge is to see how many teensy, adorable cardboard houses you can make from one tissue box.  Check out her examples!  Quite amazingly lovely.

I wanted to play along, but I have a couple of handicaps.  One - I am a little too unfocused (read: profoundly lazy) to work at one thing for very long.  And two - no matter how hard I try, I cannot cut straight.  So I did not manage an entire village of perfect little domiciles.  But I have made one single, lopsided teeny tissue box house.

Oh, also - it's a secret compartment necklace.

I used Michele's template, slightly modified, and cut out the panels from my tissue box.  I placed them onto a sheet of my favorite magical, super-strong metal duct tape, like so:

(Regular readers may remember the magical tape from a previous post, the One Minute Pendant.  It's so useful!)  I put another sheet of metal tape on top, sandwiching the cardboard inside, and cut out the panels.

Although I thought I'd cut straight, um, no, I guess I hadn't.  I realized my house was going to be crooked.  I soldiered on.  On another sheet of tape, I arranged some metal bits and pieces, then used that to wrap up the house.

So I had the two halves of my teensy crooked house.

I poked three holes.

I made an interesting contraption with craft wire and a long skinny chain.  Then I stuck the contraption through the house, and made a loop underneath the floor.

I threaded the chain up through the two holes in the roof, and added some heavy beads and a clasp.

The heavy beads are important, they hold the roof down in a windstorm.  Or if your cat breathes on it.

Finally, a little tassel.  Because I love tassels.

And that is how I built a crooked house.

The roof is lift-off-able, for hiding little treasures.

Just for fun, I shall enter the challenge.  Thanks, Michele, you are one of my greatest inspirations in this bloggy landscape.

Now if only you could teach me to cut straight!