How to Make a Fairy House

Steps

1. Plan out your fairy house. Observe and adapt ideas from woodland cottages. Fairy houses can be round and short, or skinny and tall- such as a tower.
   
2. Draw a realistic blueprint on a piece of paper of the main structure of your fairy house. Remember, it needs to be physically possible to construct this. However, decorations to your fairy house can be improvised.
   
3. Find a base structure such as milk carton or a birdhouse. You can also build one with cardboard or wood.
   
4. Gather your materials from the woods or your garden. They need to be dried natural materials because hot glue won't stick to damp or green woods.
   
5. Build your house; you can use cardboard, wood, or other materials. Glue them 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. They come in many useful colors. You can add towers by using paper towel tubes, toothpaste boxes, or whatever else your imagination thinks up. Assemble your house on top of some sort of move-able platform.
   
6. Adorn 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. Pebbles can be used in walkways or used to make a stone house. Birch tree bark has a beautiful look and you can use both sides. Don't forget to include landscaping!
   
7. Create an inside world for the fairies also. If you cut out the back of it, you can wallpaper the inside with natural materials, leather or natural paper. Either you can buy some inexpensive doll furniture or you can make your own out of twigs or clay:
   
   • Gather some dry twigs, both skinny and thick, from your backyard. Cut a couple pices to the right dimensions for a table (about 4 inches long and 1 and 1/2 inches wide) and glue them together, forming a picture frame effect. When this has dried, lay twigs across the top and glue them to the frame. Now rest some table legs upward, on the underside of the table, and glue them carefully, so the table can stand on its own.
     
   • 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.
     
   
   
8. Admire your finished fairy house and place it in the garden or the house. Keep it in a quiet, secluded spot away from pets and toddlers.
   

Tips

• Have fun and use your imagination!
  
• If you are using hot glue, get the wood glue sticks, which adhere better to porous surfaces such as wood and cardboard.
  
• You can mold clay around aluminum foil to save clay. This works for both air-dry and oven-bake clay.
  

Warnings

• 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
  
• Wood glue
  
• Twigs
  
• Cardboard
  
• Wood if you're crafty
  
• Inexpensive doll furniture
  
• Air dry or oven-bake clay (optional)
  
• A board or something flat and stiff to build your house on