Fairy nook for backyard garden: part 3: creating the cafe

 

The most detailed part of our fairy nook was the cafe.  (See more about the fairy nook in Part 1, Part 2. and Part 4.)  It was lots of fun transforming the inside of the old toy oven into a whimsical fairy cafe but required lots of thinking creatively on how to realise our vision.  This means we had to look around us for ideas and ways to make do with what we had in the pile of stuff we had collected with the hope it might be part of our fairy nook.

When we were unsure what to do, one strategy was to start with anything.  Above is a go at the cafe.  We always had a table and chairs in mind.  Sylvia found a lacy doily to cover the plastic table but I was concerned about how to keep the fabric from getting manky outdoors.  The flower arrangement in the bowl ended up in the garden area at the top.  I liked the idea of the little Sylvania families figures from the dolls house but they also were not made for the outdoors.  It wasn't right but it was a start.

This photo shows the mess as we thought our way through creating the cafe.  It was messy and detailed.  My best friend was the bottle of PVA glue.  I have found out that it was great for not ust gluing things together but also painting over items to seal them.  It was also non-toxic and washed off easily so it was pleasant to use.

Sylvia bought a packet of cute little bottles filled with glitter and topped with cork stoppers.  We tipped out most of the glitter.  I miss lots of things from when Sylvia was little, but not glitter.  Sylvia put some of her crystal chips in a few and I put some tiny dried buds in another.  I painted some icy pole (popsicle) sticks brown and made some swirls of wood grain with a skewer.  After they dried I glued small stones under them and then glued the bottles on top.  Then I propped them up between boxes and used a skewer between the bottles and boxes to make sure they dried against where the wall would be.  Like I say, a lot of details were involved.

You might not have noticed at the top of the previous photo that there is a tub of semolina that I had siting on the gum leaves.  I had glued the leaves to the top of the plastic table.  It seemed very Shirley Barber but gluing the leave on and keeping them in place and flat was challenging.  A heavy object on top while the glue dried did the trick.

The story of making the bits of the fairy nook cafe jump about because there was a lot of waiting for the glue to dry on bits and pieces.  It made me impatient.  In fact, one evening when I was in the zone, I ran out of bottle tops I was using for the seats.  E had saved them for us and had more.  So I walked around to his place in the dark to collect more bottle tops.  Also check out all the glue on the owl picture.

More on the owl picture later but for now let's return to the table.  I had wanted to have the leaves hang over the edge but they were so brittle that if they bent they snapped.  So I trimmed the leaves to the edge of the table.

In the above photo, you can see that I was experimenting with cups on the table and a flower in the middle.  The artificial flower was in an acorn cup that I cut the bottom to make it steady.

These are the gum nuts that I used to make cups.  I picked them off a gum tree while they were still green and over a few weeks they dried up but seemed to keep the green hue.  I used a knife to slice off the bottom pointy stem so that they looked like squat cups with flat bottoms.  I liked how they looked like rustic pottery cups.

Back to the table.  I decided that the colour of the cups and the gum leaves were too similar.  The needed more contrast.  I decided to make place mats of this below sheet of leafy pattered adhesive vinyl that I found with the scrapbooking papers in an arts and craft store.  The plastic edges of the table were not quite right.  I glued triangles around the edge of the table like bunting to give it a touch of whimsy.  I took an old paintbrush and painted the PVA glue over the bunting edges and place mats to make it more sturdy. 

I also found an old hairpin with a teapot button on it.  I took the button and glued a pile of about 3 short pieces of icy pole sticks to the table (it is surprisingly easy to cut them into shorter pieces with scissors).  I glued a stone behind the teapot button to help it stand up. and had to prop it up until it set enough for me to then glued the teapot button on top of the icy pole stick stack so it could be seen above the flower.  I was finally happy with the table.

I painted glue over the toadstools that we had decided to use for seats around the table.  They were cheap foam mushrooms on wire sticks.  We had put a couple in the pot plants and found they faded quickly.  I hope that being under cover in the cafe and having a seal of glue will help stop this.  (Otherwise I might need to do some re painting. 

More challenging was working out how to stand them up once I removed the wire.  By then we had decided to brush glue over the cafe floor and scatter fake gross on it (see bag of green stuff in photos further up.  This helped with developing ideas about stands.  I squeeze a decent amount of glue into each bottle cap and pushed a decent amount of fake grass into it.  I squeezed more glue onto the fake grass and pushed a toadstool into each bottle cap.  The grass and glue seemed to create a bit of stability for the toadstool and once the glue dried it would stand up, though some were slightly wonky.

Here are the shelves of little bottles that I mentioned towards the start of this post when I dried them ready to glue on the cafe wall.  As you can see by the slightly crooked lower one, I didn't get them quite straight on the wall.  It was an awkward angle.  Sylvia filled some with crystal chips, I filled some with seeds from my sticks and gum nuts, and some of them had the original glitter left in them.  I also added an acorn cap bowl, a gum nut cup and a few plastic flowers.

It took a while to put together the cafe.  When I glued the shelves on, I had the old oven balanced on one side.  When I glued the pictures on the other side, I had to balance the oven on the other side.  This allowed the glue to dry without them slipping down the wall. 

I made a couple of little pictures: one with beads pasted into a tiny plate and one with a flower off a hair clip pasted into a bottle cap.  My favourite pictures were the ones of a glittery owl and a shiny green flower that I pulled off some broaches.  I used the leafy vinyl as backing.  I used the owl or flower to measure a piece of cardboard, then cut it to size, and measured a adhesive vinyl that I stick on the cardboard. 

Then I laid the rectangle on a piece of plastic, squeezed a lot of PVA glue over it.  I cut twigs to frame it and placed these around the edge, then positioned the owl or flower in the middle.  There was so much glue it took a while to dry.  Then I glued it to the wall.  Once the shelves and pictures on the side had dried, I had to glue the flower picture on the back wall and dry that.  Note that in above picture, the oven is on its back so that the flower picture can dry flat on the wall rather than slipping downwards.

I also made some bunting by cutting out diamonds and folding them in half over a piece of twine and pasted them for sealing.  I glued the bunting at the front above the cafe while I had it on the back to dry the flower picture.  I then attached a pennant in the middle that I cut out of business card and glued it to a triangle of cardboard with glue brushed over to seal it.  Then it was time to put the oven upright and glue everything down on the floor, starting at the back. 

Once everything was glued down I found a little toy fairy on a stand and glued this at the back.  Putting together the cafe was a long and fiddly part of the fairy nook project but worth the time and patience.  Then I turned my attention to the garden area of the nook, which I will write about in my next post.

My series of fairy nook posts:

• Part 1: upcycling a toy oven - a fairy nook overview
  
• Part 2: painting
• Part 3: creating the cafe (this post)
• Part 4: creating the garden