Did you make fairy houses as a kid?
I didn't.
I imagine it's at least partly because I was the child of a pragmatic mother in cowboy country. But I also think that fairies weren't, perhaps, as popular as they are now. It seems that there are all kinds of fairy books, fairy dolls, fairy wings, fairy everything these days.
Right?
It's not just me, is it?
Anyway, Maia and her friends are all enamored of fairies. And their belief in them is encouraged even at school (with a fairy journal and letters back and forth with a fairy from their school garden).
Amidst this fairy love, Maia has been making fairy houses in the backyard and leaving out bits of food for them. The other day, she asked for help making a fairy house, so we worked together to create a simple, natural fairy house made of flowers, twigs, leaves, and pebbles.
Her ideas for how to build them come from the appropriately titled Fairy Houses by Tracy Kane. In the book a young girl visits a village of fairy houses in Maine and builds her own using all natural materials. It's a sweet book and I like it better than some of the other fairy books I've had to suffer through. (If you can recommend any good fairy books, I'm all ears...)
Maia and I built our fairy house at the base of an old willow tree. There was a living room with a large leaf as a carpet and a string of pebbles to delineate one edge of the room. We made a wall by poking sticks in the ground, weaving jute twine around them, and then weaving (or mostly poking) butterfly bush blossoms through the twine.
Daylilies along the top of the wall added an extra element of decoration.
Maia made three beds for the fairies with fuzzy lambs ear leaves and grass with hydrangea blossoms for pillows.
And at the other side of the living room was a table made of a piece of wood balanced on pebbles, a tablecloth of leaves, and some food for the fairies (mostly black raspberries and mint).
It was so fun to create this fairy house together and I imagine we'll do it again—or at least refresh the wilted flowers and put out new food offerings from the garden.
I also LOVE the idea of making a miniature fairy garden with moss and little growing plants (The Magic Onions has a great tutorial) and would like to make one soon with Maia.
How about you? Are your kids into fairies? Do they (or you) make fairy houses or gardens?
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