Fairy Garden Tree House

In this step by step instructable I’ll show you how we made a Fairy Tree House for our Fairy Garden. You’ll only need some tree branches, copper wires, some oakum, hot glue, tin foil, craft foam, wood glue, a piece of styrofoam and lots of imagination and creativity. For this instructable I embedded the video in every step with the specific part of the video coresponding to the step, and explained the process. In this intro you can see the whole video. Let me know what you think of this instructable. If you have any questions or suggestions, please, comment in the comment section below.

Fasten a copper wire around a piece of wood and insert them into a styrofoam block. Use a cutter to make the hole in the styrofoam. Glue the wood inside the hole using hot glue and polyurethane foam.

While the foam hardens connect the branches you selected for this project with pieces of copper wire. The wires should be somewhere around 20 cm.

Transform your styrofoam piece into a hill. Use a saw, a wire brush and a cutter for this process. Don’t worry about styrofoam’s bumps. We’ll fix those later.

Start building your tree using the wired branches and other pieces of wire (I used different color for these wires so you can see them easily)

Add thickness to the lower side of the branches using tin foil.

Cover the foil and part of the branches with oakum and wood glue. This will strengthen the whole thing. I used some pigment in my glue so you can easily see what I’m doing.

Start building your tree house. Draw the walls, the floor and roof using branches. When you are satisfied with the general shape glue the branches together with hot glue. Don’t rush into cutting the branches short just yet. You can cut them later when you decide they don’t add any beauty value to the house. Be creative and don’t use only straight lines (fairies don’t use ruler and compass)

Start adding the actual walls. Use craft foam sheets, marker, scissors and hot glue for this step. Draw the wall lines on the sheets placing them “inside” the house. Start with the walls, and finish with the roof. Draw each line adding a 2 mm offset, making sure not to cut to much. Try to establish where the windows will go before gluing the walls. It’s harder to cut the holes after you glued the walls in place. When gluing the walls make sure you glue on the inside so you don’t have dripping glue on the outside. The roof doesn’t have to be perfect because we’ll cover it with tiles later on.

Beautify the tree using oakum, copper wires and hot glue. You can modify the aspect of your tree so it advantages the little house. You can make it thicker, older looking, with big gnarled roots and hollows. You can also add now some window details, door, pebbles on the walls and chimney.

Add a layer of plaster, resin or wood glue for hardening the surface.

Adding the tiles. Use stripes of craft foam and hot glue for this step. Partly cut the paper at relatively equal distances. Use your thumb’s thickness as a spacer. Place the tiles starting from the bottom and working your way up the roof. Again add a layer of plaster, resin or wood glue for hardening your new tiles.

Paint your house with the desired colors. Make sure you cover all of the craft foam sheets. We chose a more realistic look, but you can use brighter colors if you feel like it. It depends on where you want to use it.

In this final step we add a layer of wood glue (the one that becomes transparent when dry) on the styrofoam piece. Make sure you don’t touch the tree. Throw dry sand while the glue is still wet. In the end your styrofoam should look and feel like a sandy rock. All you need to do now is find a nice place to position your new tree house and make lots of nice pictures.