Fairy houses and fairy wings for your dolls

After we busted out a couple of the "fairy house bottles" from the recycling to make the mermaid kingdom yesterday, I thought that we should do the others while the kids were excited by it.

I had four bottles stashed away that I cut out windows and doors and open spaces from with an exacto knife. It was pretty easy to do and there are a lot of bottles that will work for this. The wee one was a bubble bath bottle, the round one was a bleach bottle, the other big white one was a tropicana juice bottle and the humungous pale blue one (not pictured) was a fabric softener bottle that I swiped from my mate's recycling (they are used to my weird antics now). Once they were thoroughly rinsed and dried then we could get crafting with them.

I gave the kids sharpies and any stickers I could find around that looked a bit fairyish. The dollar tree had a great packet of tinkerbell sparkly stickers, which worked a treat.

We tied on some of the flowers from an old broken lei and some of the left over autumn leaves that we used in the mardigras masks and the halloween pumpkin trick or treat jugs.

I made a little pipecleaner ladder for the fairies to wash their non existant windows (shhh, it doesn't have to make sense), then the kids wanted to play with the polly pocket dolls, but oh no! They don't have wings! So, we had to make some. This is where the fairy house post goes off in another direction, because the kids got really into the making fairies project after this.

I drew out some butterfly wings at about the right size for the polly pocket dolls. They are meant to be representations of actual butterfly wings, because I thought we might as well get some kind of educational scrap out of this. There's a Blue Morpho, a Monarch and a Tiger Swallowtail in the polly pocket size.

I scanned them in, and made mirror image duplicates of each, so that we could have both front and back coloured. Printed out a few and the kids coloured them in. Then we glued them back to back (against a window so we could see through to get them registered correctly).

If you want to make some of these with your kids then I have uploaded the drawings I made for you to use. Just click on the thumbnail below to see the full size image and remember to "fit to page" when printing if you're using anything other than US letter sized paper.

Then I cut them out (too fiddly for my 3 and 4 year olds, but older kids could do this themselves) and laminated them with a teeny laminating machine that my freinds gave me to use (thank you Jessen and Lani!).

Once they were laminated I cut them out and poked four holes with my penknife so that I could thread pipecleaner arm straps through. You can see here how the straps go in from the bottom at the back, go around the arms and then back through the top two holes to meet behind the neck in a little loop that the fairy can hang from.



We made four of these little polly pocket fairies. I realised after we had made the first three that I could laminate them before the kids coloured them, then they could colour with sharpies and I could mr clean magic erase them for them to colour differently another time.



Initially I tied a bit of yarn to each fairy and then to a ring, so the kids could run around with the dangly fairies flying from their hands.







I only had two rings, and so the other two fairies got little hooks on them (plastic hooks that I had saved from packets of socks and underwear etc). Once the kids saw these then they wanted to replace the rings with hooks so they could hang them all from the pretend window in their bedroom.



We made this pretend window last weekend. We're in the process of trying to make the mini house in their room kick ass, and I'm sure I will post about all the little projects involved in it when it's done.









After this the kids wanted to make fairies out of all the bigger barbie type dolls too, so I drew out another butterfly in a larger size (this one is a European Peacock butterfly). If you want to make this one then here's the thumbnail linking to the full size image. Remember to print two, so you have the front and back of the wings.

This was too big for our little laminator, so I just put packing tape over both sides of it and my four year old spent a good while making sure she coloured the wings symmetrically (which I guess is an educational aspect to this craft).

Here's Barbie prepped for flight...

The kids have been playing with these and the fairy houses all afternoon, despite the fact that barbie in no way is going to fit into any of the houses. They are telling me that she is the mummy fairy and the polly pockets are her babies, which leads me to wonder, are baby fairies just mini fairies, or are they a weird kind of caterpillar? I bet fairy caterpillars would be sparkly.

If you have thin elastic handy, which we didn't, then it would make a great substitute for the pipecleaners, because then you could take the wings on and off easily and swap them around with different outfits ;)