Garden District Front doors

 Hello!

The Cricut Maker 3 arrived!!!  I have set it up but not gotten much further and the knife blade won't calibrate right so they are sending a new one. I am drowning in work this week so that is as far as I got :(

I have been diligently working away for a couple weeks on the front door - and at this rate I will be 100 years old when this is done! At least I am making SOME effort here though right?

The St. Charles is a great base for this house BUT it will require extensive modifications to get it as accurate as I would like for it to be. I decided to start with the front door. The doors and windows all need to be modified before I can start putting the shell together.

The house came with this front door:

This will not do! It simply cannot be a house in the Garden District without a transom window on top for starters. I would also prefer a stained glass window in the door itself and the casing around the door is far too plain and just not accurate.

The front doors are often recessed and have an arched top but I am skipping those two things to save interior floor space and my sanity.

Thanks to my extremely handy hubby the door casing and the larger inner panel on the door have been removed. 

Next I spent an absurd amount of time re-learning my neglected photoshop and designing 2 stained glass panels - one for the door and one for the transom above. 

I struggled quite a bit with different methods of how to even make these. It wasn't as simple as pulling a design off the web because I am picky and hard to please LOL! I did get a lot of general ideas off the web and finally decided on a design. Initially I tried to draw them by hand but my hand was too shaky (I have a condition called essential tremors.) In the end I got a great fleur de lis outline graphic from Etsy (Venice Waves). I plopped that into photoshop and then drew in the lines and diamonds. It remains to be seen whether my lines are thick enough so there could be some re-design in my future once I try to actually make them. The address numbers were pulled from my truck load of digital scrapbooking files I have piled up over the years.
 

I may still need to fiddle with the outer edges and sizing to get it exactly right. I am waiting on an order of assorted molding pieces so I can decide if/how I will frame the "glass" pieces within the openings.

I have several ideas about how to execute the stained glass, all of which require printable transparency sheets which you would think I would have ordered while I was laboring with (and cussing at) photoshop but no. I am ready to print and have no transparency sheets. I do have some acetate packaging I have been saving (if I can find it) that I may try 1 of my ideas on but the others will have to wait. I also had not ordered any trim moldings to start playing with either - sheesh!

Hopefully I will get to the end of my workload in the next couple days and get back to my new Cricut!