how to make fairy furniture

I've been making some fairy house pincushions for my Etsy shop and with those in mind, I really wanted to try making some fairy furniture just for fun.  I recently bought myself a book about making tiny furniture from found things and it's full of beautiful inspiration pictures.  

This is a project that could be as simple or complicated as you'd like it to be.  If you have children who can safely use a hot glue gun, this would be a fun project for them too - imagine a fairy garden tucked under a tree in your garden or in among some small scale plants in a pot.  Sure you can buy fairy garden items at a local craft store but how much more satisfying to make them yourself.

It took a little while to gather materials.  I wandered round the garden, clippers in hand, collecting delicate and interesting twigs and flakes of bark.  I had the some little spun cotton red and white mushrooms, tiny pinecones, moss and faux ferns from previous projects.  I dug out some pliers to cut the wires off the mushrooms, some scissors, hot glue gun and some tweezers to protect my fingers from the hot glue.  This website is where I got the little mushrooms from and there are lots of other special crafting goodies there too.  The moss and faux fern are from Hobby Lobby.  

The instructions in the book suggest making a square for the chair seat first and building from that, which is almost what I did....I'm not very good at following directions exactly as they are written!  I made a basic chair frame and then filled in the seat with trimmed twigs.  

The moss is really to hide the spots of hot glue but it also gives the finished chair a really woodsy feel.  Chairs could be made any size and design and the book has lots of suggestions for materials.  I wanted to keep mine simple.  

My daughter worked alongside me and also made a chair but I think hers feels more like a fairy throne!  It's beautiful.  Notice how she used a long piece of curved bark for part of the seat back?  

So, what did I learn?  

It was harder than I thought to get the twigs to stick together and I had to be patient and use more hot glue than I really wanted to.  The tweezers were a really helpful tool for pushing the tiny bits of moss into the hot glue, saving my fingers.  Next time, I'd like a greater variety of natural materials and I'm now on the hunt for interesting seed pods and bits and pieces as I'm out walking with my dog!