Fairy Wonderland

We did it!! 5 weeks, 3 trips to Michaels, a finger slightly scorched by a hot glue gun (mine, not hers), and hours of planning and toiling away. We officially have completed Lauren's fairy village. And guess what? Without being too proud of what we accomplished, it's actually way better than I thought it would be.

Admittedly, I got the idea from another mommy blogger who did this with her daughter. But the only elements I really borrowed were using miniature bird houses from Michaels as the fairy abodes, and creating village signs using popsicle sticks and mini stamp pads (from the $1 bin at Michaels). Big thanks to my dad who cut the wood to create open doors for each house.



We started by sanding down the rough edges of the newly shorn openings.



Then spray painted each house a different color.





Before decorating the houses, we turned our attention to some smaller details (that provided more instant gratification for Lauren), such as the flower pots, each one painstakingly painted by our little artiste.



Add some silk flowers and leaves (secured in place with hot glue, of course), and voila!



Customizing the fairy houses allowed us to access our ultimate creative juices. Hot-gluing multi-colored glass stones to the roof of one of the houses was particularly fun.



All 5 finished houses. As you can see, we made judicious use of plenty of bling, from crystals to glittery stickers and leaves.



For the completed village, we decided to use our family room ottoman tray as the base. I searched high and low for something sturdy to work well, but ultimately decided to go with our tray since we really don't use it very much anyways (plus, to be honest, I've been hankering for something a little more stylish in its place, so now I have a good excuse). We spread packaged moss on the tray (it smelled rather, um, mossy, at first, but now you can't notice any scent at all, whew!), which Lauren then sprinkled with individual silk flowers. We secured the fairy houses to the tray by putting down small squares of contact paper and hot gluing the houses to the paper. So the contact paper can simply be lifted up and everything rearranged if desired (plus the tray is not damaged). Glass pebble paths were also put in front of each house (the same method of gluing the pebbles to a strip of contact paper was used). Other details included placing small pumpkins amongst the moss (a package of 6 at Michaels was only $2.99), creating stamped signs (using popsicle sticks for the signs that were cut easily with shears Norm found at Home Depot) and then adding little 4th of July pinwheels Lauren just had to have (so it's a patriotic fairy village). The signs and pinwheels are embedded in Playdoh so they stand upright.

The finishing touch? Getting smaller fairies that fit the scale of the village way better than her Disney fairies (thanks Mom!).

So what does the completed project look like? Drum roll please ........................................................






A close-up of the details:








[ok, truth be told, that little man-fairy baby freaks me out a bit]







This was such a wonderful experience - we got to be creative and spend lots of special time together working on our project over the course of a number of weekends. Of course, the true test as to the ultimate success of this venture is whether Lauren thinks it's cool enough to play with.



Mission accomplished.