Another Year and Another Gingerbread House

    So it's been a whole year since I wrote a blog post about any of the craft things I've been doing, and I have been quite crafty this year. My friend and I started our own business selling up-cycled thrift store duds and we even got our own booth at the Denver Punk Rock Flea Market this December. It took a whole year to get all the product together to sell and in the end while it was really exciting I missed out on other things I wanted to be doing this year so going forward there will be less work done but more pictures, which is way more important ^^ don't you agree?

   This post is about my yearly gingerbread house though. This year I chose my inspiration as a tribute to a life long friend of mine Bob, he has run the Boulder Messiah for 34 years! Conducting 3 shows in one weekend every Christmas. It is through his passion for Messiah and years of time and money that this year was his 100th Messiah!!!!! In tribute to this amazing tradition that I have personally been a part of for 27 years I drew my gingerbread inspiration from the church we hold it in every year St. John's Episcopal in Boulder.
   Over several days I looked at pictures of the church from all angles to design a gingerbread pattern. Then I decided on my dimensions for my church mostly determined by the height and width of the card stock paper I was using. This is what all the pieces laid out (approximating the building profile) look like.

    I laminated this and used it to cut out all the pieces of gingerbread I used to create my gingerbread tribute to St. John's. It took almost 20 hours over two days to cut out and bake the 30 or so pieces used to make this yet to be decorated version.
   Lots of people ask me what the windows are made of. The answer is that I broke up jolly ranchers into fairly large pieces and sprinkled them into the holes. It's best to only do this if your gingerbread is on a parchment paper baking so the sugar doesn't stick but to be honest I still lost several windows and next time I think I'll cut the windows bigger and put bigger pieces in them, perhaps even whole jolly ranchers.

It took another 8-10 hours to get the supplies and decorate this rough, plain looking gingerbread house into an edible masterpiece that I presented to Bob at the intermission of his 101st show.