 Hi everybody, my name is Megan Viscio and welcome to my class how to create your own fairy home. This is through the Voriesville Public Library with their summer reading program. So I'm so glad you're here. I'm a fine artist and I love anything miniature. I love nature and I love foraging in nature for objects to use in art. I love animals and rocks. So when I was asked to do this program I was so excited and I began collecting things immediately outside and in my house to put together this program for you. So I'm so glad you're here. So when I think about fairies I think about a mix between the borrowers and nature foragers and if you've never heard of the borrowers it's a book series and I remember it from being a kid. It was a miniature family who lived in a big house in I think in the wall or in the floorboards and they would make their house from things they found in the big house. So like their bed might be a matchbox or a thimble could be a garbage can or a empty thread spool would be a table and as a kid I just wanted to shrink down and get into those little spaces and see what it'd be like to live there and I still love miniatures to this day and I still make them. So that was my thought about borrower or the fairies. They're kind of a mix between the borrowers and nature foragers. So when I built my fairy home that's kind of what I was thinking about but I invite you to think about what your story is going to be before you build your fairy home. Are they going to be eclectic fairies and there's maybe a lot of stuff in the yard and inventions and neat little gadgets. Does your fairy home have a spooky feel? Is it haunted and is it a little rundown? Is it neat and tidy? Maybe the grass is all one level and the house is very neat and everything is in order or maybe it's an abandoned fairy home and there's a little for sale sign and there's cobwebs or do they have a lot of kids? Do they have a lot of pets? What are their pets? So take a little time to think what your story is. So before you begin you just want to get all your work tools together and here's just some ideas of things you might need. A work surface like an old paper bag or some newspaper. It gets pretty dirty so you just want to put that down on your work surface. A glue gun is optional. It helps for some things because it grabs really quick and it's pretty strong but only used with adult supervision. A rag for cleaning up messes. A popsicle stick is always handy. Some glue. I really like Aileen's tacky glue because it grabs really quick but anything you have at home would be okay. A pair of scissors. A paint brush if you choose to paint anything. A pencil and most importantly your imagination. Okay here's just a look at some of the things I put in your goodie bags. The cardboard tube that will be the fairy home was just a piece of cardboard tubing and I cut into sections and then drilled holes for a little window and the roof is just a plastic shell type thing that will protect the cardboard tube if you put your fairy home outside. It's plastic and it'll protect it from the rain and then that plastic plant tray is something you can get also at the dollar store. Okay so now it's time to go nature foraging and you can do this in your own backyard or if you want to get your family and go for a hike that your park has a lot of great items that are anywhere. The bike trail so just some places so think like a fairy and go out and forage. Just some things you can find. Sod I got this in my own backyard. I just shoveled a small circle of the grass and with a shovel just lightly pried up that first few layers of grass the roots and the soil below and just a small piece is all you need. That's sod. Moss is great because even because it's still green so great in a fairy home it also kind of looks like miniature grass so you can find moss usually in a dark and wet place in the forest and there's tons of it. Only take what you need. Birch bark is also really cool for fairy homes. You can always find a fallen birch tree in the woods. I guarantee if you go on a hike or even in your backyard you'll always find a fallen birch tree so please only take from trees that have fallen because if you go taking the bark from a living tree it's going to hurt the tree. Stones and rocks are good. You can find them in your backyard really anywhere. Shells maybe you have a collection of shells at home. Those are great for fairy homes. Driftwood what about driftwood or some grass or flower seeds maybe you just put down dirt and then you sprinkle seeds on and you grow your own grass and your own flowers and then you might need some dirt to fill in the spaces. Okay so here's just a quick little tutorial of how I assembled my fairy home and what I did and there's no real science to this. Just use your imagination and have fun with it and just decide what you want to do and you are not limited to what you have in your goodie bag. If you find other things at home you'd like to use go ahead and use them. You don't not have to use what was given to you. It was just a kind of some things that might be fun and then you go from there. So first things we're going to do is we're going to take our plastic tray if you're going to choose to use this. If you're not again you can go right out into nature and build on a stump maybe or in a tree nook where it's been hollowed out. You can build right in there your fairy home. You don't have to use this. The nice thing about the tray dish is that it makes it a little more portable so you can take this out into nature and put it where you'd like it. So the first thing we're going to do is just we're going to take some rocks. This is just some gravel I had at home and you're just going to want to put a couple handfuls of gravel or rocks right in the bottom of your tray and what this is going to do is just help with drainage. So if you're putting living plants inside your dish you're going to want drainage so the roots aren't sitting in water and it's also going to give your tray some weight so if you do choose to put it out in nature it won't fly away. So I'm just going to go ahead and put my rocks in. That's probably good just enough to fill the bottom and then like I was mentioning this is sod from my backyard. I just dug it up and I found this kind of cool mossy type different type of grass. I don't know what it is but I thought it was cool and I liked how there was little tufts of grass in there. I gave it a little bit of unique flair. So I'm just going to go ahead and put those pieces aside wherever I want them. If you need to kind of break it up it breaks up really easily and then you just fit it to your dish. So maybe I'll put some over here and that's okay that you're breaking it up. That's perfectly fine. Now I've got a little space right here so again I just take some dirt that I have from outside and can put it right in there and if you want to put some stones under where your fairy house will be that might be a good idea because then it'll prevent the water from soaking up into your cardboard or if you have a big flat stone you could always lay a big flat stone right there and then put your fairy home on top of it. The less contact that cardboard tube has with water the better then it won't absorb the water. So anyway so I've got just my base here it's nice and heavy and now I can go and assemble my fairy home. So again you would in your kit if you got the kit you might have gotten two different types of tops one's kind of more flat plastic dish and one there's a little bug from my my sod we'll just let him go or there's this this type of like coconut roof and again I went with plastic so if you're putting this outside and you're putting it on that cardboard tube it's going to protect your cardboard tube from soaking in water because cardboard is not waterproof so if it's in a wet environment it will absorb that water. So you have those two types of tops and you have your cardboard tube so building your fairy home I kind of cut little windows in there you can use that as a window if you wanted to use it as the door you could and what I did with mine is just covered this whole thing in a little bit of moss and a little bit of bark the birch bark and then it was actually moss I had here it wasn't from nature I think it was from a train set not a train set it was from making miniatures like train sets a moss anyways I covered my tube in that and I just outlined my window in my door with a little bit of stones you want to make yourself a little door for your fairy home you can I just use cardboard and I'll grab I will show you that after I just use cardboard and I cut it out painted it brown that was my door you could use popsicle sticks you could even cut out a little door shape out of bark that could be your door but you want to have a little door for your fairy home and just cover the whole thing in whatever type of material you're going to use when I did the roof on mine as you'll see all I did was I took one of these pine cones and you guys will get these in your kit and I just you might be able to do it with your fingers I just plucked off all of these scales now this one's coming off easy just by hand that's good some of them are a little tougher and you might have to cut them off I plucked off all those scales and I just took my roof and I went around one by one starting at the bottom and I use hot glue for this just because I wanted to grab quickly and I just glued those pine cone scales one ring around then the next ring around and then the next and then I just finished at the top and you'll see that later in this video you'll see what I did so that's a way you can cover it you can also cover it with stones you can cover it with moss again this is your imagination this is your fairy home so build it any way you'd like an idea I thought when I when I had this kind of a little bit shallower coconut shell roof I thought oh it kind of looks like a mushroom so I just painted it red added a little white spots painted that cardboard tube red white and then it kind of looks like a little mushroom home so that's just a another idea maybe your fairy lives in a little mushroom so now once you've got your base all set you've got your stones in there you've got your sod or your dirt or your rocks whatever you're going to add to here and you've put your fairy home on then you're just going to landscape the rest of it and this is the really fun part I love this part too I'm going to move that out of there to get out of the way this is where you can add little stones around that'd be kind of cute to have little stones you can make a path and I thought this would be really cute what if you took one of your stones I'm going to take this one and this is just a piece of chalk you can draw little oh that's really hard on this little piece of rock you rock you can draw little flowers you can draw little designs on your rocks hearts or smiley faces I just thought that would be kind of a neat idea or you can leave them blank or you can flip them and then you got some of these mushrooms these are just foam little decorative mushrooms what's really cool about these is they just they just go right in you might need to bend that car that tube over they just go right in to your sod push them right in and then they're nice and sturdy there and here's some other ideas I wanted to show you this was the little bed I had I used that milkweed pod and all I did just going to get that out of the way so I told you it gets messy so you're going to want to either work outside or have a work paper down so all I did was took a cotton ball from my house and I wanted to tear it apart just to make it look more authentic and less like a cotton ball and I just stuck it right in that pod and then you can use a little blanket and I don't know pom pom pillow or no pillow but there's a little bed really easy one thing about fabric I want to show you so everybody has these nice neat squares but I don't know I don't think they look very authentic so I just want to teach you if you want to make your fabric look a little more weathered or that it was kind of found by a fairy and used maybe they you had an old shirt and you didn't need it anymore so it was I don't know given away or recycled or you cut it up into rags and the fairy found a little part of that shirt and was like oh we can use that in our houses so what I like to do when in my house when I made my fairy home is I just took the fabric this is not fraying too easily and I just pulled at it and made it look a little less perfect because I didn't want my fairy house to be too neat and tidy I wanted to have a little bit of character so you can just pull it and if actually that just kind of made something cool just pull it if you stretch it it kind of does something neat that makes a little look a little more authentic also with the fabric if you want to cut it into shapes maybe I made a bunting flag on mine so you could cut it into sort of like little triangle shapes or maybe you want to make a pair of fun little fairy pants I love this fabric I think I put a piece in everybody's goodie bag because well first of all it came from one of my favorite people my sister in law Charlotte she gave me this fabric that she had found at a an estate sale and I just thought it was the coolest fabric so I just love it and I use it in a lot of things so that's one of my reasons it's my favorite but then it's just such it's just such a neat fabric so you can make a little fairy clothes maybe you have a clothesline and you know you clip up the clothes so yet their fairies are hanging out their their pajamas on the clothesline to dry that's just another idea that you can use walnut shells are really cute and I just wanted to show you these are two little pieces I made and this is a bunny and a nut and a fox and a nut and you can actually see these both on my blog and how I made them this is actually not a real walnut it's a casting of a real walnut I made a cast out of mold latex mold and put clay in it so this is actually made out of polymer clay that's not a real nut and then I just made a cute little bunny with a blanket sleeping inside and a cute little fox so yeah that you could have a little walnut shell bed or a little sink made out of that here's that cat's eye I was telling you about the acorn top if you kind of put a cat's eye in there it almost looks like if you can see that just looks like water in a little bowl that might be something cute you want to add oh one thing about my fairy home and I'll mention this again I just kept the top separate because I wanted to add fairy lights and this is not included in your kit but something you can easily find a little battery operated tea light candle or battery operated fairy lights you can find them really anywhere and I put them in my fairy home because I wanted it to be just lit up and it looks really cute and cozy at night when the when the fairy lights are on and the lights are out if you'd like to glue it down it might be a little more secure you can definitely do that and of course you can always lift up the whole fairy home and put your lights right in that way just remember if you're going to put some sort of fairy light in there that it is battery powered and not a flame here's just a quick little tour of the fairy home that I made see the little milkweed bed the bee bath bird bath there's the lights inside I folded the wings of the butterfly up a little bit so it looked more realistic there's a little flag bunting and just a reminder if you are using living plants your fairy garden is going to need a drink and a little bit of sunshine okay so there you have it how to build your own fairy home I hope this video inspires you I hope that you learn something and that you can get outside and be in nature with your family and then come home and build something really wonderful and if you'd like to share what your fairy home looks like just take a photo when you're done and send it to mrs brown at the library and she'll put together a virtual online art show of all the fairy homes so if you'd like to participate in that I really encourage you to that way we all get to see what everybody else did kind of with the same supplies which will be really interesting that's what I love when I teach an art class everybody pretty much gets the same supplies and then the things that come out are all unique and all different and I just love to see how each piece of art is unique to that person so I really encourage you to send in your photos of your finished fairy home to mrs brown at the library if you'd like to see more of my work I do have a blog that I post on regularly there it's family friendly so anybody can take a look and I'm just going to do a little Jimmy Fallon type it's called the studio house blog so I'd love if you take a look take some time to take a look and if you'd like to follow it that'd be awesome too so thank you for stopping by and put on your fairy hats and go out in forage and enjoy making art thanks bye bye hello it's mrs brown from the vorriesville public library wasn't that a wonderful instructional video that megan viscio did for the fairy gardens and fairy homes how exciting I know that you are going to use your imaginations and creativity to create some fabulous fairy gardens or fairy homes and remember to snap a photo and send that photo to me through my email at gale dot brown at the oorpl.org I will take all of those pictures and create a virtual showcase of your creativity mrs viscio said that she got involved with being excited about miniatures and art when she read this book the borrowers she also said that she really liked to go outdoors and spend time in nature and think about all the wonderful natural elements that maybe fairies use or fairies might borrow to create their homes so I thought I would read a chapter from the borrowers and the borrowers live underneath a kitchen floor and in their home just like mrs viscio said they borrow items from the people who live upstairs maybe they have a matchbox that serves as a dresser for their things or a bed in the chapter I am going to read to you today is when one of the fairies ventures outdoors into the grassy lands and encounters a big person it was an eye or it looked like an eye clear and bright like the color of the sky an eye like her own but enormous a glaring eye breathless with fear she sat up and the eye blinked a great fringe of lashes came curving down and flew up again out of sight cautiously arietti moved her legs she's the small person the borrower she would slide noiselessly in among the grass stems and slither away down the bank don't move said a voice and the voice like the eye was enormous but somehow hushed and hoarse like a surge of wind through the grating on a stormy night in march arietti froze oh so this is it she thought the worst and most terrible thing of all i have been seen whatever happened to aca glotina will now almost certainly happen to me there was a pause and arietti her heart pounding in her ears heard the breath again drawn swiftly into the vast lungs or said the voice whispering still i shall hit you with my ash stick suddenly arietti became calm why she asked how strange her voice sounded crystal thin and hair bell clear it tinkled on the air in coose came the surprise whisper at last you ran toward me quickly through the grass in case it went on trembling a little you came and scrambled at me with your nasty little hands arietti stared at the eye she held herself quite still why she asked again and again the word tinkled icy cold it sounded this time and needle sharp things do said the voice i've seen them in india arietti thought of her gazetteer of the world you're not in india now she pointed out did you come out of the house yes said arietti from whereabouts in the house arietti stared at the eye i'm not going to tell you she said at last bravely then i'll hit you with my ash stick all right said arietti hit me i'll pick you up and break you in half arietti stood up all right she said and took two paces forward there was a sharp gasp and an earthquake in the grass he spun around from her and sat up a great mountain in a green jersey he had fair straight hair and golden eyelashes stay where you are he cried arietti stared up at him this was the boy breathless she fell in light with fear i guessed you were about nine she gasped after a moment he flushed well you're wrong i'm ten he looked down at her breathing deeply how old are you 14 said arietti next june she added watching him there was silence while arietti waited trembling a little can you read the boy said at last of course said arietti can't you uh no he standard i mean yes i mean i've just come from india what's that got to do with it asked arietti well if you're born in india you're bilingual and if you're bilingual you can't read not so well arietti stared up at him hmm what a monster she thought dark against the sky do you grow out of it she asked he moved a little and she felt the cold flick of his shadow oh yes he said it wears off my sisters were bilingual now they aren't a bit they could read any of those books upstairs in the school room so could i said arietti quickly if someone could hold them and turn the pages i'm not a bit bilingual i can read anything could you read out loud said arietti would you wait here while i run upstairs and get a book now said arietti she was longing to show off then a startled look came into her eyes oh she faltered what's the matter the boy was standing up now he towered above her doors are there to this house she squinted up at him against the bright sunlight he dropped on one knee doors he said outside doors yes well there's the front door the back door the gun room door the kitchen door the scullery door and the french windows in the drawing room well you see said arietti my father's in the hall by the front door working he disturbed working said the boy what at getting material said arietti for a scrubbing brush then i'll go in the side door he began to move away but turned suddenly and came back to her he stood a moment as though embarrassed and then he said can you fly no said arietti surprised can you his face became even redder of course not he said angrily i'm not a fairy oh no where am i said arietti no reason anybody i don't believe in them you looked at her strangely you don't believe in them no said arietti do you of course not really she thought he is a very angry kind of boy my mother believes in them she said trying to appease him she thinks she saw one once it was when she was a girl and lived with her parents behind the handpile in the potting shed he squatted down on his heels and she felt his breath on her face what was it like he asked about the size of a glow worm with wings like a butterfly and it had a tiny little face she said all the light and moving like sparks and tiny moving hands its face was changing all the time she said smiling and sort of shimmering it seemed to be talking she said very quickly but you couldn't hear a word oh said the boy interested after a moment he asked where did it go it just went said arietti when my mother saw it seemed to be caught in a cobweb it was dark at the time about five o'clock on a winter's evening after tea oh he said again and picked up two petals of cherry blossom which he folded together like a sandwich and ate slowly supposing he said staring past her at the wall of the house you saw a little man but as tall as a pencil with a blue patch in his trousers halfway up a window curtain carrying a doll's teacup would you say it's a fairy no said arietti i'd say it was my father oh said the boy thinking this out does your father have a blue patch on his trousers not on his best trousers he does on his borrowing ones oh said the boy again he seemed to find it a safe sound as lawyers do are there many people like you no said arietti none we're all different i mean as small as you arietti laughed oh don't be silly she said surely you don't think there are many people in the world your size there are more my size than yours he retorted honestly began arietti helplessly and laughed again do you really think i mean whatever sort of a world would it be those great chairs i've seen them fancy if you had to make chairs that size for everyone and the stuff for their clothes miles and miles of it tents of it and the sewing and their great houses reaching up so you can hardly see the ceilings their great beds the food they eat great smoking mountains of it huge bogs of stew and soup and stuff don't you eat soup as the boy of course we do laughed arietti my father had an uncle who had a little boat which he rode around in the stockpot picking up flotsam and jetsam he did bottom fishing too for bits of marrow until the cook got suspicious through finding bent pins in the soup once he was nearly shipwrecked on a chunk of submerged shin bone he lost his oars and the boat sprang a leak but he flung a line over the pot handle and pulled himself alongside the rim but all that stock fathoms of it and the size of a stockpot i mean there wouldn't be enough stuff in the world to go around after a bit that's why my father says it's a good thing they're dying out just a few my father says that's all we need to keep us otherwise he says the whole thing gets arity hesitating trying to remember the word the whole thing gets exaggerated he says what do you mean asked the boy to keep us so if you want to learn more about the borrowers you could check out this book from the library and once again this is how megan viscio first got her inspiration for loving things that are small enjoy your time creating your fairy gardens and your fairy homes and don't forget send me a picture of your magical creation have a wonderful day