Miscellaneous Madness: Wooden Doll Pin Fairies

I've been on a bit of a fairy kick lately (along with mermaids, princesses, etc.). When Kane found all those acorns recently and we used them to make jeweled acorn caps, mom got to thinking. One of my favorite fairy books, which has lots of little tiny things to flip, unwrap, and break, has several pictures of fairies wearing acorn caps. We actually aren't the craftiest of people -- we like making things, but mom can never figure out what to DO with all the crafts. Art we can display and save more space efficiently. But we continue to play with our Chinese New Year dragons, so mom thought we'd give a fairy craft a try.

There are lots of wooden doll pin fairy tutorials flying around the blogs, but mom doesn't sew and she wanted to try to use things we already had (for the most part). So here's what we came up with. We love them and are busy working on something else for our new friends ....

You'll Need:
- wooden doll pins (like these);
- fabric flower petals (we used these because we already had them);
- acorn caps (if you want a hat);
- butterfly wings (mom bought some like these, but you can also just cut them out of fabric);
- glue (we like tacky glue); and
- markers

Once you've got all your materials, here's how to put your fairy together:
1.  Put a dab of glue on the top of the doll pin and place the acorn on top. Press for a few seconds.

2. While the acorn dries a bit, glue on the flower petals for the skirt. Glue one and then continue around the pin, overlapping them a bit. We liked gluing the center of the petal and then folding the top down to make a double layer of petals.

3. Cut your butterfly wings off of the butterfly body (we were able to gently pull ours off) or cut your fabric wings. Put a dab of blue inside the pin slot and slide the wings in. Hold for a few seconds. Then gently bend the wings back a bit.

4. Use your marker to draw your fairy a face.

And that's it -- you've got your fairy!

Miscellaneous Madness: Acorn Cap Jewels

This isn't naturally a prime time of the year to find acorn caps (instead, in our neighborhood, the warm weather means an increase in street meat incidents -- apparently when it's nice out, the number of chicken wings eaten outside soars and, correspondingly, the number of chicken bones left on the street for doggie to try and snag increases as well), BUT when we were at a local park last week, I started finding tons of them. So mom went with it. She remembered seeing several tutorials for acorn cap jewels and we decided to collect a big bunch.

It turns out that it is super easy, uses materials you likely already have on hand at home, and produces bright jewels that can be used in oh so many ways. Here's what you'll need:

- empty acorn caps
- markers (we used our felt tip MALA IKEA markers)
- white school glue
- playdough, rice, beans or some other similar substance to hold your acorns upright as they dry (we used an old batch of playdough)

Scrape any dirt present out of your acorn caps and get to coloring them inside with your markers. The darker you color, the brighter your jewels will be. Set the colored tops upright in the playdough (or rice, beans, etc.). Fill them to the brim with white school glue. Let set for 48 hours and watch them transform into bright shiny jewels!

The first time we did this we used a batch of glue that had some liquid starch in it (from a botched flubber attempt) and it didn't turn out exactly as we hoped -- not all of the glue evaporated in all of the tops. We made sure we had "clean" glue the second go round and had much better success. We've been using these little gems all week for all sorts of pretend play -- they've been currency, treasure, used in patterns AND some super cute fairy projects that we'll reveal soon. If these are currently popping up in your neighborhood, get on it!