A Fairy captured in a Fairy Jar

 

When you capture a Fairy, you capture a moment in time.  For you don’t actually capture the Fairy herself (or himself), what you’re actually catching is a fairy shadow.  You see … a Fairy moves far too quickly to be caught in a jar, for no sooner have you got her inside the jar, than she’s popped out before you’ve even managed to even think about putting the lid on!

And back in the room again … (smiling here) ….  Well I said that I’d like to make another Fairy in a Jar, and so I did.  Only this time I remembered (mostly) to take photographs of each step as I did it, so that means this post is a little photo heavy, so because of that I’ll try to keep the talking to a minimum and just give you the point by point things which will explain what you’re looking at or need to know if you’re going to make a Fairy Jar yourself.  Get ready… here we go….

I found a lovely new jar in Mr. Cobs shed which  I swiftly took ownership of before he noticed it was gone,  he kindly donated (cough) and I decided that this would make a fabulous fairy jar.  I assembled everything which I’d need and began.

In the beginning  …. the was a jar.  A nice, clean, unused jar waiting to be loved.

Add grass (of the card kind) using glue to stick it in place … only …  this is where I found I’d run into a problem.  I couldn’t get my hand into the jar.  This is a very important point:   MAKE SURE YOU CAN GET YOUR HAND INTO YOUR JAR BEFORE YOU BEGIN.

• If you’ve found a jar which is narrow necked and too long for you to reach the bottom using your fingers, or tweezers … then may I suggest that you buy some extra long tweezers before you begin.  You can find them in .. Pet stores (particularly ones which sell Lizards or food for Lizards).  Or you can find them on Ebay, or at some Kitchen/Cake making supply stores.

 

I didn’t have extra long tweezers at the time I was making this Fairy Jar,  so I did my best with what I had.  (And made an unholy mess too! – see inside the jar!)

Because this particular jar wasn’t straight sided down to the bottom it meant that there was a gap between the bottom of the ‘grass’ and the base of the jar (which would have let the light shine out and it would have looked odd) .. I remedied this by twisting a little bit of black tissue paper and glueing it in place.  Again … a mess happened, but I used glue which dries clear so I knew that it wouldn’t be seen once dried.

While the glue dried, I turned my attention to the lid ….

I didn’t want a shiny gold lid,  but wanted something which looked old and almost creaky, so wanted to ‘rust up’ the jar lid. I used a tried and trusted method, using Rust-it, made by Pinflair which always gives great results.  One coat works well, but two coats really takes it to town!  (And each coat dries really quickly – so you’re not hanging about all day for it to dry.)

Two coats of Rust-It, and it looks like I found it in a good old-fashioned English, secret, walled garden. Perfect!

Although it was now lovely and old-looking, I wanted to give it a little something to make it more special….

Glitter Paste by Pinflair, in Aqua and Copper.  The paste looks thick when you open the lid but it’s a lot more ‘fluid’ when you start to use it.  It spreads very easily, so apply a little at a time as it goes a long way.

I missed taking a couple of photographs at this point as I got carried away with myself … so I’ll have to catch you up with words … 

By this time you should have chosen your fairy and are ready to add her to your Fairy Jar.  Simply choose the position you want her in and then using an instant fix glue (we call it Super Glue here in the UK.  It bonds in seconds and can be used on paper and glass amongst other things).  This will hold your Fairy in place.

Once you’re happy that she’s not going anywhere …   you’re ready to adhere some tissue paper to the outside of your jar.  You can simply use PVA glue for this, and just one sheet of tissue paper. (one sheet thick – if you need more tissue to go around your jar, obviously use more.  But only one sheet thickness).

Spread PVA over part of your jar,  (make it a full bottom to top section, but not covering the screw part where the lid fits, obviously) then lay the sticky part down on your sheet of tissue paper, lifting it up straight away, otherwise the glue will quickly make the tissue tacky and it will stick to your work surface. eeeek!

Do this all over your jar, in sections at a time, until you’ve covered the whole of the jar.  Allow it to dry.  (Give it about an hour).  Then you can begin decorating the outside.

Add some magic to the outside of your jar using glitters and anything else you feel will give you the result you want.  Here you can see that I’ve used a mixture of Pinflair Ice Diamond – which is really chunky type glitter – but it’s not twinkly like normal glitter.  It’s got a fabulous magical feel to it.  I also added just a tiny bit of Pinflair Snow Dust – just to give the outside a sort of crisp look.

For this jar I tied string around the neck,  however you can use ribbons, straw, or anything which gives you the look you’re after. (On the previous Fairy Jar I made, I used a hessian ribbon – which I loved. You can find that jar on the Cobweborium blog).

Then …  add your flowers … or anything else you’d like to have on your Fairy Jar.  You can personalise it in a gazillion ways.  Whatever takes it in the direction you want it to go!

There are many things you could add to your Fairy Jar.  Here, on this, (2nd) Fairy Jar, I’ve added a ‘Key to the Land of the Fae’, and a tiny vial of ‘Fairy Dust’, which has been corked and then sealed with pink wax.

The Key to the Land of the Fae, and a glass vial of Fairy Dust.

One side of the Fairy Jar ….

The other side of the Fairy Jar …  but … this jar has a secret ….  and it’s on the back …

Hidden within the jar isn’t just a Fairy, but it also hides a Fairy Wishing Tree!  On the outside of the back of the jar, I added some nature, some nurture and some love.

Time to add a little magic.  Shall we?

 

The inner light, although magical looking, is made by T.Lights.  BATTERY operated T. Lights.  Please, please don’t use real candles.  Paper, card and candles don’t mix well.  Only ever use battery operated T.Lights inside Fairy Jars.

The Fairy Wishing Tree, lit from within.

The side of the Fairy Jar …  but do you see what I see?  There is one light at the base ….  and another light half way up the jar.  How can that be?  Is it floating?  Is it … MAGIC?

If you’re making a Fairy Jar for yourself,  you’ll find that it’s best to use smaller fairies as the lights from your T.lights will only shine and flicker at the base of your jar.  However, I wanted to use a larger fairy,  so had to figure out a way to let a light shine further up the jar.  I could have bought some of those short lengths of craft lights – a little like Christmas Tree Fairy Lights – only made for crafters and operated by battery,  but I wanted that warm glow that you get from a candle so … I found a way of making that happen. ….

I made a little gizmo out of Florist’s Wire, which I loosely wrapped around the ‘flame’ of the lower candle and then supported another candle which kind of hovered about it.  I’ve taken more photos from other angles so that you could see how this wire frame works…

Make sure, if you make one of these, that you bend the end of the wire at the top so that you don’t put your hand inside the jar and get stabbed by it.  It would be jolly painful!  So bend it over and make a sort of handle so that you can easily lift it out of the jar to turn the candles on/off.

Photo taken from ‘underneath’  showing how the wire is bent under the upper T.Light,  to support it.  Then shaped around the outside of the T.Light and over the top, and around the ‘flame’ to anchor it.

Photo taken from over the top of both of the candles.  You can see that the candles pretty much line up, and also how the wire extends over the top of the candle and wraps gently around the flame to just keep the wire in place.

This wire support isn’t made of stiff wire, but it’s ‘bendable’ wire,  so take a little care when using it.  But if you knock it out of shape when you’re turning the T.Lights off and on, then you can easily just fiddle with it to make it stand up again.  Once you get used to the way it needs to be bent, you’ll get the hang of it.

I loved making this Fairy Jar and particularly loved the little roses I chose.  They were exactly the shade I was thinking of in my mind, and as if by magic … there they were!

Well that’s me done and dusted.

Hope you’ve had a good weekend, and that your week ahead turns out to be a happy one without too many problems or struggles, and that any problems you come across aren’t anything which you can’t handle.

Thank you SO much for coming and sharing some time with me.  I so enjoy your company.  Please feel welcome to leave a few words via a comment, and I promise to reply.  I love your comments as it gets us all chatting to each other, and other people reading get a feel for what you’re like and will want to come and visit your blog too.  It makes blogging world go around so well!

If there’s anything which I’ve forgotten to mention and you’d like to ask about, please ask away.  I’m more than happy to help if I can.

Well all that’s left for me to say is … Have a  truly Blessed rest of your day!

Sending crafty hugs  . . .

 

 

 

 

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Make a Wish!

I began making this card over a week ago.  I knew the ‘look’ I was aiming for, but at each stage of the making I stopped and kind of ‘fell out’ with the card.  Something was nagging at me, telling me I didn’t like it.  But I kept going back to it and doing a bit more, and a little more .. until it was finally finished on Saturday, and now it’s made, I LOVE it.

It has a sort of steam-punkery feel to it, but not.  A kind of vintage feel – but not.  A bit of a fantasy thing – but not.  I actually can’t pin down what type of descriptive ‘category’ it fits into.  Perhaps you can help me with that one, because I’m stumped!

But … I’ll talk about the making of it:

I forgot to take photo’s of the first couple of stages, so you’ll have to imagine that you saw the paper I layered down on the 6″x 6″ scored and folded Kraft card, (a vintage style paper with a duck egg blue background and roses of various colours and sizes all over it) which I ‘vintaged’ the edges of by blending some warm brown ink from a stamp pad using a bristle blending brush.  Onto this I layered a 5×5″ piece of lush green coloured card which I’d embossed using the Crafters Companion ‘Leaf Vein’ Textures Embossing Folder.  (LOVE this embossing folder!).  I gently ‘scuffed’ the raised leaf vein embossing by dragging the same brown ink pad which I’d used to blend  the base paper across the embossed veins, in order to give more importance to the texture and make the veining stand out even more.

I then ‘topped and bottomed’ the card with some of my most favourite lace in my collection, and then added a narrow piece of fresh green organza ribbon over the top of the lace, just to bring the colour out of the card.   . . . . . .  Now came the fun part.

Adding the paper doily was something I knew I wanted to do in order to draw the eye to what I was going to make as the main part of the front of the card.  The flowers were made myself, using a Tim Holtz die (which I’ve had for ages and really don’t use enough – tsk tsk), and some scraps of cardstock in pink, blue and a mustardy yellow, with a scrap of green card for the leaves.  I cut the flowers out on my Big Shot machine in my craft room, but then took them all into the living room and spent an hour shaping and putting together while I watched a film on TV.  The butterfly was from a small box I keep in my craft room,  filled it with any left over die cuts which I don’t use at the time.

I added some WOW glitters to the tips of some of the petals of the flowers, and the wings of the butterfly.

Then came the ‘WISH’ ….

I have a few of these little, lightweight tins with clear lids (sometimes used for Wedding Favours – but I use them in crafting for all sorts of things).  I cut a piece of mottled green paper and fixed it to the inside of the tin.  I then  put some multi coloured Flower Soft just around part of the bottom of the inside and left it on one side to dry.  I then worked on the lid.

In my little tin of ‘saved die-cuts’ I had a tiny little stem of blue bells, which was left over from a card that I’d made ages ago, and I knew these bluebells would look perfect on the lid of this little box.  So using some glue, I glittered the blue bells to turn them from plain black, into something more magical and pretty, and fixed them to the clear lid of the box.

See the bluebells on the lid?

Then I went back to the little tin box and added some wiggly lines of glitter to the green paper base, and then fixed the crystal glass Fairy Wishing Ball.  This was probably the most fiddly bit.  Keeping that incy, wincy, tiny, little crystal wishing ball in one place would have tried the patience of an Angel with nothing on her mind!!  But, in the end, I won and anchored that baby in the right place, and then added the teeny bottle of Fairy Dust.

All that was left then was to add a very small die cut butterfly, and the little tin box was all finished.

But .. the card wasn’t.  The ‘Make a Wish’ sentiment was computer generated (I used a fabulous fancy font), printed out onto some white cardstock, matted onto some black card then cut by hand, and shaped so that it curved out from the card and stood proud, just a little.

I wanted to make this a card of wishes, plural.  Not just one wish, but four.  So … for the inside of the card I made a tag …

A dandelion wish, and a wish-bone wish!

The tag has two more wishes hidden inside the card  … a tiny little resin Wish Bone, and a Dandelion head .. ready to blow!

Of course … the card had to have a box.  You couldn’t send this in a regular envelope because of the depth …  so I made it a matching box.

The box for the Make a Wish card

close up of that miniature postcard

Once I’d finished this card I stood back from it and gave it a long look … and loved it.  I wish I was a better photographer because in real life this really is such a pretty card, with a kind of magical promise about it.  It’s not a card for a child, but for someone older, perhaps a mom,  or friend, aunt, cousin, work colleague … someone who believes in the power of a wish.  Someone who needs to feel that you’re wishing them good luck …  and wants them to wish it for themselves.  Someone with a birthday, who no longer has candles on their cake which they can wish upon as they blow the candles out.

Fairy Dust isn’t just for children.  Fairy Dust,  Fairy Wishing Balls,  Wish Bones  and Dandelion Wishes  are for people who believe in the magic of their dreams.

Go on … Make A Wish!

Thank you SO much for coming to visit today.  I very much appreciate your company, and thank you for the time you’ve spent with me here.

Please feel free to leave a comment behind before you leave.  I love to keep in contact with folks who read my blog, as it get’s us chatting together and we kind of get to know each other a little bit more. The internet can be an ‘isolation box’ for people, and I just hate that.  So let’s get talking to each other!

I’m wishing you a truly blessed rest of your day.

Love and squidgy stuff ~

 

 

Fairy Shoes ~ Pollens Pods – inspired by a Bumble Bee.

… because even a Fairy has to have shoes!
These are Pollens Pods.

 

Pollen the Fairy has a very important job in the Land of the Fae, and that job is to dust down the flowers after the Bumbles have paid a visit.  You see, Bumble Bees can be very messy sometimes and in their desire to collect pollen from flowers, they will occasionally get a little over greedy and splosh tiny specks of pollen all over the flowers and their petals!  So Pollen the Fairy was put on the job and he dusts down the flowers with a very special brush, made from the hair of the Fairy Princess.  (what?  you thought that a bristle brush would do the job?  tsk tsk)

But .. Pollen needed new shoes and so wanted Cobweb the Cobbler to make some which had a nod to the important flower dusting job.  Cobweb thought long and hard about this and eventually came up with ‘Pods’.  The cobbler took some pea pods, and fashioned them into the right shape and correct size, but felt they were the wrong colour.

So the cobbler asked a passing Kingfisher bird  if he would be willing to gift one of his beautiful blue feathers to the cobbler.   The Kingfisher obliged!  – and Cobweb then went to town and, using the feather donated by the Kingfisher,  painted the pea pod made shoes!

Slowly, as the cobbler painted  –  the bright blue colour of the feather began to seep into the green of the pea pod made fairy shoe and dyed it the incredible bright blue colour you see in the photographs!

But … that wasn’t enough!   A fairy wouldn’t just have plain blue shoes for hecks sake!  No fairy would want just a boring plain shoe!  Nooooo.   Fairies  have  to have something special.  And that’s where the magic began.

… the front and back, and the back and front!

These fairy shoes are covered in the pollen of all the different coloured flowers which the Bumbles like to visit,  and the vines which wind their way around the shoes are there to gently hug the ankles of the fairy wearer so that the shoes don’t fall off in mid-flight,  for that would be disastrous!

A comment made by another blogger made me realise that I’d hadn’t shown any of the boxes which the Fairy Shoes arrive in,  so I thought that perhaps I should include these boxes in the photographs from now on.   So the first photograph (at the top of this post) and the last one (below) show the top (and sides)  of  the hand painted and decorated box which Cobweb the Cobbler delivers the special Fairy Shoes in.

The other box in the background?  …..  Ohhhhh … well you’ll have to wait till next time in order to see the shoes which belong to that box!  😉

Fairy Shoes
all hand-made by
Cobweb
@ The Cobweborium Emporium

 

This post is dedicated to a fellow blogger, who’s photograph of a Bumble Bee was the inspiration behind this post.  You can find her truly beautiful and peace filled  blog here:   http://friendlyfairytales.com/

Have a blessed rest of your day,   and  …  thank you for visiting and taking the time to read.  I hope you like the shoes!

Fairy Dust … and it actually works!

Fairy Dust
made by Cobwebs

I totally adored making this little card and had such a lot of fun making it.   It was something I’d wanted to make in order to send to one of the younger members of my family (a 6-year-old little girl) as a surprise through the post.  She’s completely dotty about Fairies, bless her heart.

A handful of Fairy Dust was carefully decanted into a teeny tiny glass bottle.  I popped in the cork,  added a label and then tied it up with ribbon.

The picture for the front was printed out onto cardstock. Thick enough to take the dark colours but still thin enough to cut and hold the curl, where the bottle of Fairy Dust bursts through the page.   I measured and cut the picture and curled back the centre sections, then I stuck the picture to the card which I’d already cut and made to size, and already done and decorated the inside.

Once the bottle of magical Fairy Dust was tied onto the card …. ‘Voila’!  – one magical, very special, Fairy Dust card.

Just to accent the card and give it a bit of a magical twinkle, I used a very fine nib glue pen and sprinkled a little glitter dust in all the right places.

My six years old relative totally loved the card,  and I loved the way it turned out!

Thanks for visiting and reading!

 

Feathered Fairy Dresses – all hand made.

Happy Wednesday!

I’ve decided that it’s Feathered Fairy Dress Wednesday today,   so I’m giving you a selection of Fairy Dresses to add to your virtual wardrobe!  So no complaining that you’ve got nothing to wear!

The bottom half of the dresses are made from dyed feathers and the bodices are all cut by hand using a selection of different coloured mirror cards.

So .. choose your dress, slip it on and we’ll all meet outside at 4pm today  . . .  then all we need is faith, trust and a little bit of Fairy Dust!

 

The backgrounds to the cards are all embossed – sadly the camera didn’t pick that detail up.  (apologies for the photographs.  I’m useless with a camera!)

Wishing you a bright, cheer filled, contented day!  love ~