The fairy house/terrarium type thing my older kids made featured in my spring home tour a couple of weeks ago, but I wanted to come back and do a separate post about it (and the one Abe made later) because it was such a surprisingly big hit with all of them, and it’s not terribly often these days that I can find a crafty project that’s genuinely fun for the whole family.

The past few times I’ve gone into Michaels, I’ve noticed that they have a display of many adorable, tiny things to be used in fairy houses and whatnot. I happen to be a HUGE FAN of adorable, tiny things, so I filed this information away in my brain and hoped an excuse would present itself for me to buy some of the tiny things and use them somewhere.

I mean, because look:

Yes, that is a hedgehog reading a book.

Incidentally, this is not a sponsored post at all. I wish it were, because I’m embarrassed to admit how much I ended up spending on adorable tiny things, and I really could have used some help from Michaels paying for all of it. You can see the prices of some pieces up there, and you can see the 50% off sign. So, yeah, even at 50% off (the next time I went they were all 40% off; I don’t know if they’re ever not on sale), this stuff can add up pretty fast. Someone who plans ahead for her fairy garden making could save a good bit of money by keeping an eye open and collecting adorable tiny things at the thrift store here and there, I bet.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

So. Spring home tour time was coming up, and I knew I wanted to use my recently thrifted glass house terrarium thing somewhere. I thought about putting last year’s gold painted bunnies and some moss in there and calling it done:

…but the pull of the adorable tiny things was too strong to resist.

So one Saturday morning I headed off with Milo and Ari, my 15 and 13 year olds, to pick out some stuff at Michaels. I can’t remember how I ended up with those two kids in particular; I think Abe was off with Dave somewhere and Gus mysteriously decided not to come. But my two teenage boys and I had so much fun picking this stuff out! We spent forever there coming up with a plan and going back and forth about each piece we chose.

The tiny adorable things aisle is divided into three sections: beach, woodland, and farm/backyard. Milo and Gus already had a little wooden bridge plus a couple of animals that they had picked up on our trip to Blairsville, GA last summer, so we opted for more woodland stuff to complement those things. We bought a roll of moss for the bottom of the terrarium from the floral aisle, because they didn’t have exactly what we wanted with the miniatures (they did have an assortment of ground coverings, and we got some little pebbles to make a path, plus some blue ones to make water for the bridge to go over.

Then we brought everything home, Gus was sad to hear about all the fun he’d missed out on, Abe insisted I take him to get his own fairy house stuff later (which I did, largely so he’d be content to sit back and let his older brothers execute their grand vision on the first one)….and I turned them loose to work, with minimal help from me. This is a big advantage of craft time with older kids: you don’t have to help as much AND you get a more polished product for your spring home tour at the end.

And finished!

I know it’s hard to see what’s going on, but there’s the bridge over the stream, with little animals in boats, and then a stone path leading over to the little village of toadstool houses. OMG. So cute. And, again, it is difficult to overemphasize how into this all my kids, including my jaded 15 year old, were.

And then, as promised, I brought Abe back to the store a couple of days later and let him spend some more of my money. I used this….what is this? A cheese plate? This glass thing for Abe’s fairy house. He had a VERY hard time deciding on what to buy, because he wanted everything, but ultimately I steered him in the direction of a….campsite/farmyard? And I let him arrange things exactly how he wanted. Because I already had a well organized fairy garden that my older kids had made for me anyway: