SPRINGTIME PINTEREST CHALLENGE: Wee Fairy Garden Gnome!

Posted by Ethne~

It’s springtime Pinterest Challenge* on one of our very favorite blogs, Young House Love – and amazingly of all, it’s actually feeling like spring up here in big city, MN.  I was looking at my Facebook pictures yesterday (I don’t get on there much, sorry creepers) and we had snow on the ground on April 23^rd.  Insanity.  I just about lost my mind, no lie. *The Challenge is actually posting on May 8th, but Lori's doing one of these too, so we're doing my day first.  Link up to YHL on the 8th if you wanna see what everyone else tried out for spring.

I took this picture of my flowers on my table with snow outside on 4-23

Springtime means that Ethne goes ape-crazy over gardening.  I daydream over what I’m going to put into my pots and my teeny little garden.  I’ve been on Home Depot’s online garden center asking their expert for help pairing the perfect plants – they said put perennials in with annuals in my pots (say what?!) for more selection (I asked for options besides petunias and geraniums).  FYI, if you join their online garden club, you get a $5 off (a $50 purchase) coupon just cuz.

The crowning glory are the girls’ fairy gardens.  Anything in miniature is awesome, from the wee fairy furniture to the itty-bitty plants – I’m in heaven.  The girls are WAAAAY into the fantasy of our yard’s fairies.  This year we decided to be more detailed - I tried to go to a fairy gardening seminar with them but it was a sit-down class, not hands-on, so we had to leave before I learned anything (the girls weren’t interested in a slide show from the arboretum, despite my pleas) - this left me with the internet. 

There’s a lot of kitsch out there, and some of it is pretty junky.  I think I’ve figured out what plants to use – we’re not going crazy with some of the true miniature plants I’ve found at places like this here since the MN weather isn’t temperate enough to keep them alive.  But I think I can achieve the whimsy with plants that will live in MN fine and that won’t break the bank.  I’ve got some serious plans y’all!

For the Pinterest Challenge, ya gotta check out what I pinned.

3/4" tall - I.COULD.DIE.  Find him here.

Ya, that’s pretty much what I thought too.  Cutest ever.  Except he’s $17 and I have two kids.

So I said to Whit, surely we can make this little shaver ourselves?

You bet.  I stole two of the girls’ Squinkie toys, painted their clothes red and blue and crafted pointy gnome hats out of the clay you mold and then harden in your oven – it comes in a zillion colors from JoAnn for a couple bucks.  It worked great because I whipped the hats up at the same time we were making wee clay veggies for KD’s fairy garden since she wants her fairy to have a vegetable garden.  You read that right.  And just to keep you coming back, wait till you see the teensy shepherd’s hooks Daddy made out of a coat hanger.  Gah!

I just used the $1 acrylic paint pot from JoAnn - then sprayed them with clear spray paint when they dried to seal the color - we'll see if that works!!  Here, the girl's legs are still Squinkie green, not gnome blue.  The boy was originally all Squinkie green.

 

Glue gun affixed the clay caps to the gnome heads.

Aren’t my girls’ Squinkie gnomes just the cutest?  Not your traditional Travelocity gnome, it’s true – they’re more the Gnomeo & Juliet type.  But they are totally perfect for the fairy gardens of two little rascal twins named KD and Easy Mac.

I raided Shaun's tool cabinet and found two screws - glue gunned to the gnome feet and they will stay put in the garden now!

Sneak peek.