I’ve been a little quiet lately. It’s thanks mostly to this gorgeous sunshine and my unhealthy addiction to spending every minute I’m not working basking in it with our family… but I did promise that my next post would involve crafts – so I thought I would share a bit of progress on some projects for our twins’ three-year-old birthday.
There is something magical about a little child’s face when they believe in things they can’t understand. I love it. I find it to be the perfect place between innocence and imagination… and I want to nurture it in our kids whenever we can. That’s why we’re building Pixie Hollow in our back yard this weekend….
From the minute they saw Tinkerbell and Rosetta our girls just knew they were meant to be fairies. We rolled with it and read stories about Peter Pan and the fairy crew each evening. The kids loved each of the tales and started making up their own play stories about their special land and their special roles as ‘tinker fairy’ and ‘flower fairy’ and sprinkling pixie dust so that they could fly and save the treasure. So when it came time to plan their special day – we knew it would need to take place far away … to get there you just have to follow the second star on the right and go straight on until morning.
We started with emailing save the dates that looked like this. Then I made tiny scrolls that told a story about lost pixie dust and a great treasure hunt, and filled tiny vials with a little bit of glitter – noting in the invitation that there was just enough here to fly over to Pixie Hollow on the special day. I wrapped the glitter filled vials with the scroll invite and finished off the look with star tags that had each child’s name on them. Truth be told; I dislike evites. I love writing personal notes. But as time has gone on, I’ve come to realize that busy lives are not conducive to hand delivering special packages like these – so many of our little friends are yet to receive their treasure hunt and pixie dust … which leaves me thinking … thank goodness for the evite.
Next I started making tutus for each of the fairies to receive when they come to Pixie Hollow. So far we have 8 done and 2 left to go! They are super easy (but a little time consuming – thanks mom and cam for the help!) and there are tutorials all over the web – but here is my super simple 3 step process:
1. measure the waist of your pixie and sew elastic about an inch smaller into circles 
2. measure the waist to knee of your pixie – and cut strips of tulle double that length – for us it was 16 -17 inches total (you’ll need at least 50 strips per skirt)
3. tie knots around the elastic by folding the tulle in half and pulling the ends through the hole (around the elastic). One tip is to make sure you always tie the knots in the same direction so that it looks consistent… like this
Then, while watching Jimmy Fallon one night (he’s so talented!), I cut a bunch of triangles out of felt we had around from felt board projects and sewed it to a vine like ribbon to make colourful bunting to welcome people to pixie hollow…
We have had the kids involved pretty much the whole way through as well. They love to paint and make crafts so when I visited Urban Source on Main street and found giant white cardboard flowers I knew which little fingers would paint them up for us to put on the trees and set the scene!
Those same little pixies made giant tissue paper flowers yesterday and had a blast scrunching paper and gluing it in place. I think I’m going to use these to create a similar scene to what I made for Matthew’s super hero party last winter – but instead of flying superman over the city of Metropolis it’ll be faeries over Pixie Hollow…we’ll see. They might just decorate the tree trunks outside too.
I’ll leave you with a few little teasers for things I’m making over the next couple of days …
I found this antique headboard at Farmhouse Furniture in the clearance area – don’t you think it might make a great sign?
Cam has also been hard at work transforming hangers and the girls old tights into teenie tiny faerie wings.
…and what better way to re-use old little cupboard doors than to make magical fairy doors out of them? 
We’ll see what projects we actually get through and what will remain as good ideas for another time … but I wanted to keep you in the loop and inspired in case something crafty is brewing in your house this week. More to come in a couple of days… have a great day!
PS – those Tink and Rosetta costumes on Kate and Charlie in the feature photo were hand made by my mother in law – aren’t they awesome? This pic was taken the day poor Brazil lost in the world cup – but Matty still proudly wore his shirt in support of his favorite team 🙂
We have a great little ice-cream maker by Cuisinart – you just keep the bucket in the freezer and pull it out when you want to make ice-cream. Put in all your ingredients and then turn it on for 25 minutes and it magically makes icecream…and completely ignore the fact that you just used cream and full fat milk, and sugar, and m&ms in the process of making your ‘pure’ homemade delicious icecream… So yummy on a hot evening! We found these awesome thermos containers by Zak that keep the ice-cream frozen – even on a picnic for a few hours.
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