For the faeries

Yesterday morning we were watching The Wisconsin Gardener on PBS and Shelley Ryan, the host had on a guest named Tatiana Katara who is a Wisconsin artist who makes beautiful faerie houses and furniture.  During this episode, Tatiana showed the viewers how to make a faerie bed.  Amelia was so enchanted with the thought of a faerie bed and hardly blinked while watching them make it.  I've never been into faeries much, but there was definitely something magical about it.   She made it all look so easy with just a hot glue gun, sticks, little pieces of fabric and little found things from nature such as acorns, flowers, leaves, etc. Since the idea was fresh in Amelia's head, I thought we should make our faerie bed right away that same day.

We went to one of our favorite parks and walked along some trails looking for things in nature which would be just right for a little faerie.  It was a wonderful way for the kids to look around and observe things in nature.  It turned out that fall is a really great time to look for things.  Most of the flowers have seed heads or have dried up, acorns and pine cones have fallen, leaves and moss are on the ground.

Amelia had a blast building this little faerie bed.  Since we were using hot glue, I did the gluing, but she told me where to put everything, and she picked out the fabrics for the blankets and pillows.    We had brought home a cattail reed and I used it to weave a little headboard.   Building this little bed was very fun and easy to make, and the end result was so cute and enchanting.   We even made a little table with an acorn vase with flowers.  Amelia had such a good time and wanted to keep adding more things.

When we were all finished we decided to bring it inside and put it on a little table in our kitchen in hopes of a faerie visiting during the night and sleeping in it.  Fischer was skeptical about faeries being real or not.  After the kids went to bed, I opened up the covers to make it look like a faerie had slept in it.  When the kids saw that in the morning they were so excited and surprised.  It was like the excitement that they get on Christmas morning!  Once they saw that, they started drawing little pictures and hiding little presents under the bed for the faeries, and they even filled up an acorn shell with cereal for them.   It was so sweet and magical.
 

 If your interested in the interview, you can watch it here, plus they show some of her other faerie furniture.  It originally aired in 2006, but is still very inspirational.