Make a Fairy House

Legend has it that if you build a fairy butterfly home and leave it in your garden, you might attract a fairy into your domain... Yet, even if you don't believe in fairies, this is a great creative project that will warm the heart of any person who loves miniature project and pretty things for the garden. It's also a great project for the children to help with.

Steps

Designing the Fairy House

  1. Imagine your fairy house. Fairy houses can be short and fat, taller and skinny, simple and cottage-y, ornate and castle-y, rounded and soft, angular and dramatic, and so on. decide which style you like before you start planning your design.
  2. Sketch your fairy house onto a piece of paper. Think about where windows, doors, pathways, and chimneys might go. Remember, it needs to be physically possible for you to construct the fairy house, so don’t get carried away!
  3. Decide what to build the house out of. You can use a milk carton, a birdhouse, cardboard, wood, or twigs to make the house structure. You can even transform a dollhouse into a fairy house. Remember that you will be decorating it at the end; even if you don’t like the way the structure of the house looks, you can cover this up later on.

Finding Materials

  1. Gather materials from the woods or your garden. Find leaves, mosses, branches, pebbles, acorns, dried grasses, and other natural items to decorate the house. If you plan to glue the house together, make sure the materials are dry; glue won’t stick to anything wet.

Building the Fairy House

  1. Build a base for the house (optional). If you want to keep your fairy house indoors, it might be nice to make a base to set the house on. Take an old piece of cardboard or scrap wood and decorate it to look like an outdoor setting. Add moss to look like grass, twigs to look like miniature trees, and pebbles to look like boulders. You might even want to build the fairy house in a container garden.
  2. Put the fairy house together. Glue cardboard, wood, and other materials together using a hot glue gun or perhaps wood glue. It may be too costly or time-consuming to make your whole house out of clay, but oven-bake clay is great for turrets or windows and comes in many useful colors. You can add towers by using paper towel tubes, toothpaste boxes, or whatever else you can think of. Ex:
    • Stack twigs like Lincoln logs. Lay two twigs down parallel to each other, then lay two different twigs on top of the first two so that they cross them. (They should look like a square with overlapping corners.) Keep stacking them this way until the walls are as high as you want them to be and then add a roof.
    • If building an outdoor house, make the walls and roof of the fairy house and then cover the whole thing with dirt or mud to make a rounded hobbit-house. Press flat stones into the sides to create walls and add moss to the top to make a thatched roof. Leave a hole where you want the door to be and add a hollow stick, reed, or piece of bamboos to make a chimney. Press a few pebbles into the dirt leading up to the doorway to make a path of stepping-stones.

Decorating the Fairy House

  1. Create an inside world for the fairies. Cover the floors with sands, leaves, or moss to create soft padding. Make a hammock from the fronds of a fern or a piece of stocking and add scraps of fabric for curtains. Turn an upside-down teacup or saucer into a table and use acorn caps as bowls. You can even add “wallpaper” made of dried leaves, leathers, or hand-made paper. If you want to add furniture, you can either use doll furniture or make your own:
    • To make a table, for example, gather some dry twigs, both skinny and thick, from your backyard. Cut four pieces and glue them together to form a rectangular frame that’s the size you want the tabletop to be. When this has dried, lay twigs across the top and glue them to the frame. When the top has dried, cut four pieces to the same length and glue them underneath to form the table legs.
    • Clay furniture is much easier to make but does not look as rustic. There are no real directions: just carefully mold some air-dry or oven-bake clay into furniture.
    • For more ideas, see How to Make Your Own Dollhouse Furniture.
  2. Decorate the house with your findings. Once you have made your structure, you can decorate it with doors, vines, etc. Rustic and natural features will seem more realistic. Birch tree bark has a beautiful look and you can use both sides. Don't forget to include landscaping!
  3. Finished.

Tips

  • Be sure to add everything you can imagine a fairy would need. You can start by imagining what you'd need like clothes, food (plastic, a couch, a table, etc. Now imagine what a fairy would need. Maybe sprinkle some fairy dust here and there? Get creative!
  • If building in the woods, outside of your garden or backyard, be sure to use only natural and found objects (e.g. shells, tree litter, twigs, bark that has fallen off of the tree), or things that have washed up on shore at the beach (e.g. wine corks, sea glass, pieces of rope).
  • Avoid signage, such as "Jennie's Fairy House, 2006." A fairy house is supposed to be anonymous so that it remains a mystery who made it!
  • Don't use plastic, duct tape, staple gun, hot glue gun, or anything that will make the fairy house intentionally permanent, or a possible hazard to wildlife. Songbirds, small rodents, amphibians, in addition to gnomes, may get stuck or injured on staples, glue or duct tape.
  • You can mold clay around aluminum foil to save clay. This works for both air-dry and oven-bake clay.
  • It might help to go on a walk to find things such as twigs and branches.
  • Keep the house small. If it is too big, no fairy or gnome would want to live there, because it will be too obvious. A fairy house that sticks out will also attract trolls, or other predators, which hurt fairies and gnomes. Also, people who don't like fairies, called "stompers", will stomp on a fairy house that is too big and obtrusive in the woods.
  • Make sure you keep it somewhere animals such as pets don't pee or make a turd on the house so keep it a bit high but not too high.
  • You could add a little pool for their feet.... But don't make it too big or their wings will get wet.
  • You could add a swing for the little ones.
  • You can also add some glow in the dark stones in the house to give it a mystic look.
  • Make sure you build your house in a quiet place, perhaps a corner, under a bush, but hidden. You don't want to scare your fairies or gnomes by too much noise.
  • (Optional) Make a fairy sign saying "Welcome All Fairies!"

Warnings

  • Keep the house in a quiet, secluded spot away from pets and toddlers.
  • If you want to put the fairy house in the garden, be forewarned that it will fall back to nature unless you have used water resistant glues. Don't worry: if you keep it inside, you are still likely to attract the local fairies. If there are any in your area, they've probably already ventured inside!

Things You'll Need

  • Hot glue gun (only for fairy houses in your own backyard or garden but not in the woods!)
  • Wood glue (same applies)
  • Twigs
  • Tapes
  • Cardboard (only for garden/backyards designs)
  • Wood if you're crafty
  • Inexpensive doll furniture (only for garden/backyard designs)
  • Air dry or oven-bake clay (optional)
  • A board or something flat and stiff to build your house on
  • Decorations taken from the outdoors

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Sources and Citations

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