Fairy Castle

I know I know, I've been away from this blog for ages.  I don't have a reasonable excuse, just that with summer here we've been even more busy than usual, and something had to give a little.  I'm still around, still doing arts & crafts and other fun stuff with the kids - I just haven't quite got around to posting it yet :)

So the other day (weeks ago now!) my lovely daughter & I set to making this fairy castle.  We saw some examples of fairy houses similar to this while at the County Fair, and thought it looked like a lot of fun - and it was!!  We got some tins (washed & dried) and my big girl arranged them in the best "castle" arrangement - she's rather particular, lol.  Then I hot glued them together and hot glued some craft sticks around all the tins. We also added some yogurt tubs on top of the towers.  I had thought we were going for the "woodland nature fairy" look - but once I let her go with the paint I realised I couldn't have been more wrong.  Being a 5yr old girl - she went with PINK!  And glitter, and sparkles too ofcourse!!  We just dug through my "bits & bobs" box to find stuff to decorate with.

For a surface we just flattened a regular old cardboard box, covered it with brown shipping paper and then painted that.  We added a pond (a little lid of a yogurt tub stuffed with tin foil and painted blue, for a shimmery water effect), a swing (made from craft sticks, yarn and scrapbooking embelishments) and a table (from a cork, cardstock and even legos for the chairs).

Finally we got some "woodland creatures" and a couple of fairies out of her toys!  A perfect, PINK fairy castle - hours of fun, and best of all I got to spend time creating something with my big girl.  My husband had taken the boy on a "boys" outing :) 

Truth be told, it didn't take more than a few minutes for the little man to take all the pretty marbles & stones off the tops of the "towers" - so don't leave a project like this unsupervised with little ones around!