Fairy Fun Box!

The Dreamer was recently invited to a birthday party of a fellow classmate. Because both she and the Caveman love their needle felted toys, she suggested that we create a gift for the girl similar to a project that we had completed before embarking on a small vacation last spring.

Last spring, after becoming inspired by a wonderful find on Pinterest, we succeeded in creating our own version of a "gnome fun box" to be used for travel.  I ended up creating 2 boxes, one for each of my children, and these containers have weaseled their way into cars, restaurants, beds, couches, and outdoors. They encourage an imaginative approach to play and are small sized and self-contained.  They provide the perfect dose of excitement for bored children who are trapped in a monotonous adult environment.

According to the Dreamer, however, a "gnome" fun box would never ever do for this particular birthday girl, due to her disdain for gnomes.  Instead, she dictated, we must accommodate for this by creating a "fairy" fun box.

We bought a small, shallow, square wooden box and began our project.  The first task at hand was to create a ribbon stop inside of the box in order to allow what we would later designate as our sky portion, to sit in an upright fashion during play.  I cut a scrap of 1 inch wide white and pink polka dot ribbon and hot glued it to the top and bottom of the box.  Now the box operated perfectly.

The Next step of the project at hand, was the creation of the fairy habitat.  I wanted to use wool felt to allow for needling details onto the surface.  I opted to buy both a sheet of blue and a sheet of green wool to serve as the backdrops for our sky and grassy landscapes.  I then trimmed them to the perfect size square shapes to fit into their places within the fun box, and it was time to decorate.  

Onto the blue sky, I needled a simple yellow circle for a sun, along with two white clouds.  For the grassy half, I decided on a blue pond complete with lily  pads made from the scrap cuttings of the green sheet of wool and a pinch of pink needled on as the water lily blossom.  I also felted a gray cavern hidey hole.  I used hot glue to attach the wool sheets to the wooden box covering my earlier ribbon attachment in the process.

All that was left to add were the characters.  Following the completion of a little brown rabbit, I launched into the fairy forming.  Unsure quite where to begin, I decide to go with a peg doll based invention.

I felted a rectangular shape of pink wool and wrapped it around the lower (body) half of the peg.  This was secured by needling at the seam, and also by adding a few drops from the hot glue gun between the wood of the peg and the wool of the dress. 

For the hairdo, I choose to braid 3 sections of wool into a long thin braid that I proceeded to wrap in a circular fashion from what was to be the crown to the outer edges needling as I went.  At the end, I shaped it as needed and reinforced my felting before attaching to the head of the peg again settling for hot glue.

To finish, I added a petal from an artificial flower as the wings via a mixture of needling and glue, although, in the future, I believe I may just attach this part by sewing to ensure a more secure attachment of the wings.  One extra touch of a rosette was glued over the hole in the flower petal, and we were all very pleased with the sweet, whimsy results.

A ribbon for wrapping, and our gift was complete!