Sprinkling a little magic dust

I’ve thought about building a fairy garden for my daughter (and me, if I’m being entirely honest!) for a few years now.

But I’ve been put off by the elaborate, fancy, expensive ones that adorn Pinterest, Instagram and the like.

 

However, I soon realised it doesn’t have to cost the earth or involve lots of new stuff. The most expensive addition to our fairy garden was three alpine plants, compost and some pea gravel.

It’s amazing how many fairy-garden-ready items you can find kicking around your shed/house/garden, neglected for ages and needing a new purpose in life. Charity/thrift shops are also treasure troves for little bits and pieces.

For the container, I recycled an old Belfast sink which had seen better days and added a log that didn’t quite fit in our fireplace last winter.

Tiny sawn pieces of branches made an ideal table and chairs and I used old glass beads for the pond/paths.

Even fairies have to do washing occasionally so I took two twigs and a piece of twine and cut up some odd scraps of material with pinking shears for the washing. It’s held on with mini pegs, the kind you get in most craft shops.

I did concede to a small person’s requests for a few new items, namely this cute ceramic cat, which fits perfectly into his shell bed we dug up. The fairy door was also bought for this project.

Knots and holes in the log were chiselled out to insert windows.

Not sure the whale is a native to the garden pond, but he moved in all the same.

This is the garden’s first Spring as it was built last autumn. Other than having to replace the washing line and take out a few random weeds, it hasn’t needed any maintenance. Unlike a made-to-measure shop bought one, this approach takes a little while longer to ‘bed in’, but I think it’s all the better for it.

You can make the basic garden in a few hours and just add to it as and when you like. Just make sure if you’re using a heavy container like an old sink that it’s in situ before you start! The mix was about a third grit to two-thirds compost as I didn’t want it too rich for the alpines.

It’s also important to make sure you have adequate drainage so the plants don’t rot. As well as a gritty mix of soil, I added small stones along the bottom of the sink and made sure the plug hole was clear.

When choosing plants, alpines are ideal as they don’t take much looking after and are fairly small and compact so work to scale in a garden this size.

The whole garden, including compost, grit, plants and the fairy door and cat, came to just over £10. All the other items were recycled.

It really is very simple and cheap to make and will reward you with hours of play: the only limit is your imagination! Hope you’ve been inspired to sprinkle a little magic fairy dust in your garden soon.

Flower child

It’s that time of year when you really need to be out in the garden enjoying the sunshine, not reading blogs about being outside on a computer (or for that matter, writing them 😉 So, this post is short but sweet, but makes the most of the gorgeous flowers you can find in hedgerows and gardens this time of year.

Making a fresh flower headband is an activity which you can help even very young children to do, and by the age of three, many will be able to do most of this themselves.

Cut a thick strip of paper or card that is long enough to go around your child’s head (we used white but anything you have to hand will do just fine). Either put double sided sticky tape along the entire length or cheat by doubling over regular selotape, which is a bit fiddlier but will still work.

Wander around your outside space looking for flowers and leaves that catch your child’s eye, and arrange them on the sticky side of the headband, filling as much or as little as they like until it’s finished.

Make slits in the bottom of one end and the top of the other so they slot into each other when it meets at the back of the head or simply selotape it together and you’ve got a simple but effective headband that can be made within even the shortest of attention spans!

If you have a little more time and are inspired to do some more flower projects, why not try making flower prints? You will need a small rubber mallet for this, but it’s very simple to do.

Just take two pieces of old white cotton and cut it into squares of equal size (it doesn’t matter what size, but probably no bigger than A4 is a good idea). Gather some flowers and leaves and arrange in a picture on one of the pieces then lay the other piece of cotton on top. Give it a good bash with the mallet until you start to see the colours come through and then peel off the bits of flowers and leaves to reveal the masterpiece beneath.

It’s a bit of trial and error to get the right flowers and leaves – ferns work really well and any white flowers tend to end up as a brown mush, from my experience!

I still haven’t quite worked out what to do with all the fabric pictures yet, although they would probably look quite nice in a frame. I did hear of one woman who made her entire wedding dress using this technique, but I don’t think my skills are up to that standard quite yet!