Faerie Houses with Sarah

Mom and I went on our annual trip to Columbus, Ohio to visit our friend Sarah, who Mom used to work with at AEP. The traffic was super heavy for some reason, but the foliage was gorgeous.



Sarah lives in German Village, a quaint neighborhood with lots of brick and wooden houses, brick-paved streets and sidewalks, flower boxes, trees, and people walking their dogs.


This is the street Sarah's house is on.


And this is Sarah's house!


The front of the house is original, but Sarah and Dan bought the land behind their property and added on to their house and made a lovely garden.



When we went inside, we were greeted by a new member of the household - Nettie!


Nettie had fooled Sarah and Dan at the animal shelter by pretending to be old and feeble, and then when they came to pick her up to take her home she was racing around the place. Turns out Nettie had just been spayed before their first visit and wasn't feeling very well. She's a pip!


Mom and Sarah, neither of whom wanted their pictures taken. In Sarah's defense, she was suffering from a cold while we were there and spent most of the night hacking. This is Mom's fake smile (in case you couldn't tell).


This is the Deaf School Topiary Garden nearby. Matty and I got together and had lunch and then went for a walk there on Saturday before hitting the airport for a round of shopping - really! I got myself a Columbus sweatshirt, my mom a Columbus t-shirt, and everyone some yummy cookies. The Columbus airport rocks, yo. Anyway, the Topiary Garden shows a scene out of a Seurat's "A Sunday On the Island of La Grande Jatte." Can you see it?


This is Mom working hard on her faerie house. We had been collecting bark and twigs and flowers to dry for a couple months before going to Columbus so we could make wonderful faerie houses.


Mom got a little hot glue crazy, but she thought it had a nice sparkly effect. Note the swing at the side of her faerie house!


Sarah contemplates her faerie house. She thought her faerie house was too large in scale compared to ours. She decided her faerie house was for giant faeries or perhaps gnomes.


The finished product - beautiful!


This is the beginning of my faerie house. I started with a relatively flat piece of bark for my base.


I made a little bed, complete with flower pillow and feather blankets, and a little round table and benches out of cut twig. I used dried flowers for my carpet.


Then I added a back wall, to shield the faeries from the wind, and a side wall of a dried mum branch so they could see outside.


This is the front of my finished faerie house. If you look closely, you can see the teeny furniture inside. Outside are dried Russian sage, iris, some variety of evergreen, astilbe, and many other dried flower blooms stolen from public parks and the ground at Lowe's.


We kept our supplies so we can build faerie houses again someday. All of us wanted to do another. Sarah and I would like to try our hands at making cool furniture for inside. I think Mom might want to improve her swing, as it didn't have a lot of flexibility. :)

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with my faerie house. I know if I put it outside, it will get ruined by the weather, but I don't know where to put it inside either. Right now it's on my dining room table. :)