Fairy House Display

My employer purchased Fairy House/Garden supplies at the spring show and they arrived just before Christmas.  Most of the tiny furniture was sold already and I wanted to make the display "cuter" so I brought in the fairy house I had made many years ago out of a simple cardboard box, glue, twigs and dry autumn leaves.  The roof is shingled with sugar pine cone "petals".  I got the idea for the house from the elaborate houses at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens which I saw on Martha Stewart.

The BBG has replicas of famous buildings and landmarks made from plywood and coated with leaves, twigs etc and then coated thickly with resin.  To protect the buildings.  They are arranged on an elaborate landscape with hills and "woods" with many trains running through the "town".  Small trees and shrubs landscape the terrain.  You may be able to search for this on the internet and see it for yourself.  I don't have the time to learn how to insert such a link.  Going to work in minutes.

I wanted to try the idea out on something small and quick before attempting a large building.  I had planned to add a building to the front landscape area of my house (under the mugo pine).  I did manage to provide the children at our Town library with a program where they made fairy houses out of pint cream cartons (which already had a pitched roof) before giving up on this project and starting work on the original Spooky House made out of a cardboard box.  Also, thanks to Martha Stewart.

In fact, I was always talking about creative things I had learned from Martha Stewart that my friends, at the time, expected to arrive at my house to see that I had elaborately stenciled my driveway.  Whenever I would see a MS program where Martha was sewing something (with the iron at hand for pressing seams, I was overcome with desire to sew.  She just made sewing on a sewing machine seem like such a WONDERFUL experience.  Nothing like the experiences I shared with my machine.

I would wander down the hall and look at my machine and ask it "why" it had to be so stubborn.  Broken threads, wads of knots in the bobbin, broken needles, gathered seams when I expected smooth flat ones.  So much anguish.  None of the serene bliss of watching Martha sew seams and make scarves, pillow covers and other lovely things.  I now have an excellent machine and better thread.  The machine and I still have our "moments" when nothing goes right, but I know to walk away.  More often things are lovely when I sew and my Bernina and I are happy.  Not as happy as Martha, but happy.