How To Make A Fairy House

 Written by: Makinsey Ekman

Why Fairy Houses?

If you've read more than one of our posts, I'm sure you've realized we are all about that #thriftymom life. I never throw anything away if I can help it, which has made me quite the craft hoarder. A few months ago our son had to go on formula and I just felt so wasteful throwing away all of the cans, since he goes through 1-2 per week.

Then an idea struck me. Why not save the cans and use them to make fairy houses! Our local library has a little fairy garden that my girls are obsessed with, and they've been asking to have one of their own ever since they saw it. What an easy and inexpensive gift to make for my sweet girls!

Supplies

• Hot glue gun (or super glue if you prefer)
• Paint (whatever color are your kids favorites)
• Paintbrushes
• Sharpie
• Xacto knife (or a box cutter)
• Formula Cans (you could also use cardboard or anything else sturdy you've got lying around)
• Leftover craft supplies (I had glass stones, stickers, and tissue paper leftover from various other projects that I used)

Step 1: Home Basics

First, I took a sharpie and traced a door and windows on one of the formula cans. When everything looked the way I wanted, I took my box cutters and cut everything out. You can make the doors shorter, or even more round. I chose easier shapes since all we had was a box cutter so it was much harder to do rounded edges and such with the bulkier tool.

Next, I took a second can and chopped off the top and bottom so that I had a cylindrical piece. After cutting that in half to make a roof, but I found that my roof was too rounded and wouldn't fit on top of the house. To fix that, I made a tiny incision along the middle (inside and out) and gave it a slight bend, which ended up being perfect!

In the pictures above you can see that I traced roof shingles along the piece, though you could always paint these on or even paste individual tiles on out of construction paper. For the front and back of the roof, I took a formula can lid and cut it in half. With the final formula can lid, I cut it up into little bits that looked kind of like grass for my house's window planters.

Step 2: Hot Glue

I was making two houses (one for each kid) so that's why the picture above shows two roofs. I hot glued the top of the roof to the front and back. Once those were dry I put glue along the bottom edge and hot glued the roof to the house base. Just make sure all your pieces are ready before you start gluing, as the hot glue will dry fast.

After that, I took two small pieces of leftover cardboard can and cut them to the size of a little window planter for the windows of each house. I hot glued the grass I'd made from the leftover can lids to the "planter" and then glued the planter under each window.

Step 3: Painting/Decorating

I did a really thin layer of paint on the roof so that the shingles were visible underneath. Then I painted everything else the same color, at my daughters' request. In some areas, where I'd made markings for cutting and whatnot, I used a thicker coat of paint. The acrylic paint also seemed to work really well on the plastic lids.

I had some leftover glass pebbles, stickers, and tissue paper which I used for decoration on the house. I glued the gold sticker onto the flat side of the pebble, and then glued it to the house. Next, I did the same thing with the tissue paper. Once it was kid approved, and all dry, it was go time.