There once was a woman who lived in a shoe….

Made by Jon Keller

For a while I wanted to do a paper mache project that was not an animal.

After giving it much thought ( weeks and weeks of thought ) I decided to make a shoe house ….. the kind that you might find in a nursery rhyme .

Here is a brief description of my project materials and technique:

The frame : Cereal box cardboard , cardboard tubes , aluminum foil and masking tape.

The shoe: Paper mache made with newsprint , water and white glue . I soaked strips of paper and ran them through a blender . Then squeezed out the water and kneaded it with the glue .

The roof: Cardboard with paper mache tiles. The triangular sides were made with popsicle sticks.

The smokestack: Card stock rolled into a tube and a cone, painted black.

The deck , the window , the doors and the steps : Popsicle sticks ( some were the wide kind ) , balsa wood , and acetate ( for the window pane ) . Stained with wood stain and tweaked with acrylic paint .

The shoelaces are real …..but I did bleach them to a lighter color .

The entire project was painted with acrylic paint and then varnished with water based matte varnish .