Fairy gardens and dinosaur gardens - two ways

When trying to decide what to sell on our charity stall I spent ages googling ideas. I found one list that just had "fairy gardens" as a suggestion, but no further information. I wanted my gardens to cost as little as possible so that kids could afford to buy one with their pocket money. So I set to making everything that you might possibly find in a fairy garden with polymer clay. Obviously something like fimo would be preferable but I wanted quantity over quality so I bought some non-brand stuff. It's obviously not going to make any great works of art, but is good enough for the £3 I would be charging for my gardens. 

Anyway, I wanted to write up what I did in case it is of help to anyone else googling fairy gardens to sell for charity events.

I did two different versions at two different events. For both I used these pots, which are adorable by the way. (And to add to the adorableness I bought small paper bags from Hobbycraft that fit perfectly)

Make your own fairy garden - version 1 (for younger kids)

Here's all the elements I made. I did one fairy house or volcano for each pot and one fairy or dino. The rest I just made as many as I could and let the kids pick whatever they wanted.  

 Here is a finished pot. All of the clay pieces had earring posts attached to them so that they could be staked in the ground. Once the kids had chosen their pieces and placed them I had a little pot of magic fairy seeds (microgreens) that I let the kids sprinkle all over their gardens. You can see my greens starting to grow here

Here's some of the dinos. There's a bazillion online tutorials on all of these things so I'm not going to go over how I made them. 

For both the fairies and the dinos (and indeed everything else) you must make them with clumsy little fingers in mind. My first batch of fairies had long ponytails, arms at right angles and delicate skirts but they broke very easily so I kept the arms against the body and gave them bobs for haircuts. For the dinos it is worth gluing (or liquid polymer glue) all of the spikes in place.

Dan said that they looked like they are attending a fairy convention and I couldn't unsee that!

Again, there's loads of tutorials online for tiny fairies, so follow one of those, but I would say that the secret to making many fairies successfully is to do it in stages and bake them lots in between. I made the rocks that they sit on first, and shoved a wire in there to build the fairies on. Bake that and then the legs, bake them and then make their body and petal skirts etc.  

Here's some frogs and some hedgehogs (literally just brown balls that were snipped with little scissors and given a pointy nose)

Also in the picture are snails and mushrooms (I blended brown and white for the shroom stalks which looked very good)

Here's a close up of a bee, some flowers and some ladybirds

I didn't get many pictures of the dino side - but here's some eggs just about to crack open

Here's an overview of all of the fairy things I made. Two types of fairy houses, snails, a few owls, hedgehogs, lots and lots of flowers (using a tiny cake decorating cutter I have)

The first picture in this post shows the dino side best, as well as the volcanos and eggs I made dino footprints, bones, cactuses and trees

A couple of other points - I made the displays by hot gluing some upholstery foam to some random wood I had lying around and used a staple gun to attach material that has a loose enough weave to poke the earring posts through. I also took some spare pieces of upholstery foam because I had a handful of people say they didn't want a whole garden but would love eg just one snail, or a few different bits. I bundled them up in the foam and charged 50p or £1. So basically I would recommend making as many little bits as you can until you run out of either clay or time.

Make your own fairy garden - version 2 (slightly better for older kids/people)

Version 1 above went down very well, so much so that I was asked to have a stall at another event - our local Pride - but I wanted something a little more 'grown up' and I also didn't have enough time to make more of the 200+ pieces that were included in the first iteration. 

So I used the same pots as before, added a purple creeping thyme plug to each and bought a whole load of cheap stick-on jewels if the recipient wanted to decorate it. There were just two polymer clay elements for these pots so I could spend more time  making them a little bit better. There was a figure to be staked in the pot - either a fairy or baby dinosaur - and a pot clinger - either a unicorn or dinosaur.

I didn't take many pictures of this set up I'm afraid, but here they all are. The fairies this time had their wings printed on transparency sheets and painted with shimmery nail varnish (rather than the fantasy film of the first batch). They were also a little larger and generally a little better as I could spend more time on them. I used this tutorial as a starting point for the pot clingers. May I draw your attention to the two T Rexes, their arms are too short to cling, so they use their jaws to hold them up!

To display and transport them I got a large box, cut the top off and then trimmed the top piece ever so slightly so that it would fit inside the main box. Glued some upholstery foam to the top piece and then sewed some material that is loose enough for the earring posts to poke through to it. I attached a piece of card vertically to the underside of the top piece so that it would sit just below the top of the main box. This also gave me partitioned space inside the box to put fairies on one side and dinos on the other for transport. The clingers just hang on the main box edge.

Here's a close up of the mane and tail. Also, to streamine the process I found it easier not to blend the arms and legs into the body (my clay was so soft every time I tried to blend it just changed the shape of the whole piece). So I got around that with the unicorns by making them unicorn teddies.  I used a dotting tool to make a seam line along her nose to make her look sewn and 'buttons' on the arms and legs.

And remember I mentioned this was for pride? I'd made some love penguins at the first event so for Pride I needle felted pride flag love penguins. Lots of them!

Here's the whole stall, I think it looks very good (note the tiny square paper bags I mentioned earlier on the right hand side, the pots fit in them perfectly!)

Finally, I made a few fairies in jars as well, here's a studious little lady in a mango chutney jar.