Fairy houses are adorable and when you put them in a teacup they just get even
cuter. Hi there, Sandy here, welcome to part 2 of our series on making this
darling fairy garden in a teacup. So last week I showed you how to make little
houses, how to make succulents, mushrooms and flowers, and I just wanted to add a
few things to what I mentioned last week. I wanted to show you last week but I
couldn't find it that you can also use a thick piece of wire to make windows for
your houses. So just like that you can pop that in there. After you bake your
little houses you want to just antique them with some dark brown or black
acrylic paint, you can see here's one that wasn't antiqued and here one is one
that is and it just makes the doors and windows and details you added show up
better. These succulents that we made, I just wanted to mention that some of them
got pan pastels which really is a nice look for succulents, it makes them look
more real, these ones are more fantasy they have mica powders but usually
succulents don't sparkle like this but they're more like this one or this, that
got chalk pastels. And one other thing, I had to laugh at myself when I was
watching the video and I was showing you how to use this strip of baked clay to
emboss the doors and windows and I watched myself going like this, doop doop
doop to make a door and I just laughed because I said, gee all you got to do is
turn it this way and press, silly. I just said, "Duh, Sandy!" Just an addendum to those
items that we made last week. Oh, and here's a little mushroom all painted and
all I did was dipped this little ball tool in white paint and then dipped it
on here, dabbed it on here and painted the bottom inch of the toothpick white
as well. So as promised I have a few more ideas for things that you can add to
your fairy garden. How about if we make some a darling little
ladybugs? So I have some black and red clay as you might guess and I just
rolled a little ball less than a quarter of an inch, flattened it a bit, pressed it
onto the tile and then I rolled out some red clay on my pasta machine. There's two
problems with this scale: first of all my set of mini Kemper cutters are all too
big for cutting circles to make the ladybugs red parts and this one is too
small. This sheet of clay which is rolled out
on the thinnest setting of my pasta machine and is pretty thin is actually
too thick. So that actually made the problem easier
to solve. I'm going to use this small cutter, this is the 3/16 inch cutter, and
you can see that's too small for the wings of this ladybug, but since it's too
thick all we need to do is flatten it out and that makes it bigger and thinner
and problems solved. So that's about right, this is really thin and very
delicate so I'm going to cut that in half and then use my blade just scoop it
up and if you can... this is tricky,
sometimes a needle tool helps.
And it might take you a couple tries to get the proportions right so that you
like the look and just kind of roll that between your fingers a little to wrap
those around the body and then roll some itty-bitty pieces for the the dots.
Here's a way to do it, just pick that up, cut off a little tiny bit, pick it up on
your blade and use that to actually smush the dot right on. That didn't,
that's not particularly round.
And you can add just one dot or just a couple whatever you want. I'm adding
three because that just seems to look good,
and then if it's too small just press it a little bit more and it'll spread out.
Then go on and add as many dots as you want and then roll a little ball, and yes
I'm using sparkly black clay because the ladybugs in my fairy garden have sparkly
black parts. What I love is to roll this into a ball and then as I press it onto
the ladybug's body you kind of flatten it out into an oval which looks more like a
correct shape. And, yes, maybe I'm going insane with the details but I wanted to
add little antennae, and what I have here is I think that's probably 30 gauge wire.
I'm going to cut about an inch and this is so thin it can be tough to to push
into the ladybug's head so use a pair of flat nose pliers and hold it like within
1/8 of an inch quarter of an inch at the end of the wire
and then you can just stuff it in there, push it right in there,
and you use wire cutters to cut it off at the length you want. I have to do
a better job than that, Here are a few I did earlier with the aid of my
magnifying light. Don't you think they will look adorable crawling around our
fairy garden? Now I've been using red clay and black clay so I'm going to wipe
my fingers because we're moving onto bunny rabbits which maybe I would have
been smarter to have done the bunnies before I did the ladybugs. It all really
depends on the particular project that you're doing and the sizes and
proportions that you want but what I have here for mine is about an eight or
ten millimeter ball of white clay and try to keep your hands clean but don't
stress about it too much... just roll it into a ball... because we have a trick that
will help clean it up, and then roll it into a bit of an oval and kind of
flatten it down to your tile. For the bunny's head I have a six millimeter
ball and I'm just going to pinch it between my thumb and forefinger a little
to make it a little bit more triangular like the shape of a bunny's head, kind of
tap that down and also flatten the back and that's, that's more the shape of a
bunny's head. To make his little nose just use a needle tool you're going to
make a v-shape pointing down
and then a line below that there, and then you can also use your needle tool
the poke a spot for the eye. Go ahead and place that on the bunny's body but don't
put it too far forward. I think he looks cuter, he looks like he's kind of sitting
and squatting if you put it further back. I left his head a little round and
now we can just press it down just like that.
For his ears I have a couple of about three millimeter balls you can make them
bigger or smaller. I actually looked up pictures of bunnies online, not that mine
are going to look exactly like a bunny, but I think I got the general shape. So roll
those out into tapered like carroty shapes and don't press them flat, just
use your needle tool to do that job. Press in there to make that little
crease, then take a little bit of pink chalk pastel, you don't need much, just
scrape a little off, and a really tiny paintbrush and you can put that pastel
right in that spot.
Oh cute!
If you want you can also put a tiny dab of the pastel on his nose. Now I tried
mixing up a little pink clay for his nose but I wasn't really happy with it.
It was very hard at this scale to get the nose the right size and shape so I
thought just a dab of the pastel worked well and then pop on his ears. Oh he's so cute already.
Have his ears going whatever direction you want, again, just look at pictures of
bunnies online. You'll see all different ways their ears go. Oh my goodness he's
cute. Okay, almost done, actually. Pinch off a little tiny bit for his tail,
of course. Now this is white clay, oh goodness, and see, I'm just terrible, I'm
so bad at keeping white clay clean. I just... it's it's very frustrating. So I
found a workaround that not only keeps the clay clean but also makes him look a
little fuzzy. I would suggest before you do this that you just let him sit awhile,
don't do it right away, let the clay firm up and cool off a little bit, and get
yourself some white chalk pastel and scrape a fair amount, maybe a teaspoon or
so into a small dish. And here's a little bunny I made earlier and you can
probably see that the white clay is absolutely not
pristine, it's kind of covered with lint and such but we're gonna take care of
that, we're gonna drop him right into that pastel. I imagine you could just use
chalk like school chalk. I I know I bought some and I have no idea where it
went. Now you may have a hard time getting him
entirely coated so I have a little tiny scoop here and I'm just going to use
to cover the whole thing now not only... whoops his ear fell off. I'll
probably bake it as is and glue it on after because he's covered with pastel. It
makes him look fuzzy. So then you can take him out and don't worry about
brushing off the excess now, just bake him like that. And then here's one I did
earlier you can just take a soft brush when he comes out of the oven and kind
of brush off the excess. Isn't he adorable? To do his eyes just get some
black paint and a toothpick, you don't even have to squirt any out you can just
dip the toothpick in whatever you can find on the cap and then you can see
what I did here, just get the toothpick right into that hole and we'll darken up
his eyes and give him those little black eyes. And now you have cute little bunny
rabbits running around your garden. The bottom is going to be covered with
pastel so you might want to just run a little sandpaper over that before you
try gluing it in place in your garden. The next thing we're going to make is a
little arbor for our flowers to climb up. I just grabbed a couple of colors of
green and loosely mixed them together and then roll out very, very thin snakes.
And again, for the proportions you just have to look at what you have in the sizes
you're doing, mine is probably a couple millimeters thick.
What you're going to do with this is form your two sides of the archway so
kind of stick a little bit down to your tile and then just pull it in the other
direction until you have a u-shape that's about the size of your arbor. Make
two of those.
I'm not flattening it I'm just sticking it so that I can bring that curve around.
Make them a little bit longer than you want them to because some of that's
going to have to stick into the ground. And also make just a small section,
probably that is more, I know that is far more than we're going to need, of just
the green straight because those will be the side pieces that will hold the arbor
together, and bake those. When they come out of the oven you'll have something
like this. Now you need some sacrificial scrap clay and you'll also need some
Repel Gel. This is the way I figured out to do it that just seemed easiest and
what you're going to do with your scrap clay is roll a round shape that will fit
inside here or that your arbor will fit over neatly. So a little bit smaller.
Arbor or trellis I guess you could call this,
and the idea here is that we're going to put the two pieces of the arbor on here
and use this as a form to help us in placing our other pieces. Here's one
that's done so you can see what I mean and this is the sacrificial piece that I
baked it on and that way we have the shape and the form rather than having
the these little tiny bits and pieces flopping about. So what you'll need to do
once you are happy with the shape is just coat that with some repel gel. Make
sure you get the whole thing. This is great stuff if you don't have any it's
one of those things I don't use every day but when I need it I'm really glad I
have it. So there, just like that. Place two sides of your trellis on there
at whatever width just looks good and proportional to you, that looks about
right to me, try to keep them parallel. Next I have some translucent liquid
sculpey and I have here a teeny tiny dotting tool. I actually found this at a
Job Lot in with the with a little pack of nail art tools and this is great. So
right on the inside wherever you want your first rung you're just going to put
a little dot of TLS you could use a toothpick for this as well,
and then sort of look at your pieces and get an idea of the measurement and cut
it and err on cutting it big because you can always cut it down. I found it's
easiest to grab a pair of tweezers and put that in there and now I see how much
more I have to cut off. I think it's easier to do it this way than try to
get it perfect the first try. And then you end up cutting it too small. Still a
little big,
but you have plenty if you cut it too small just toss that piece and try
another one.
Just like that. Then once you have that in place go ahead and get a little bit more
TLS and put it on the joints. Try not to get too much on the form but you will
get some and that's okay. There, okay, and repeat that for all of the rungs that
you want. I put five on mine and now you can add your little flowers so wherever
you want one you want to put just a tiny dab of TLS especially along the sides
because you've got gravity working against you there. What you don't want is to put
so much liquid clay that the flowers just slip and slide, and there. I think I
just put five flowers on here and just let it set for a while before you put it
in the oven so that the the liquid clay gets tacky
and grips onto the flowers. And that was how this was baked was right on this
form and when it came out of the oven it was a little stuck because of all the
liquid clay that was in there and I had to just gently peel it off but it's fine
as you can see. So here are all of the elements that I've made for my little
garden I also collected these which are just undrilled
chips that I've bought for other various projects, and also a bag of moss. You can
get these at your craft store they'll sell just bags with a variety of
different mosses for just filling in spacers. Like these ones kind of look
like a bit of a forest in the background which might be cool. I did already kind
of get started in putting my... in choosing the placement of some of the different
elements in the teacup. I built up a little mound here for the biggest house
and added some moss and some of the mushrooms. Now if the mushrooms don't want to go in
and you feel like you're going to break your toothpick just take an awl, shove it
down exactly where you want your mushroom to go and then you can put that
in. These I've just put here as placeholders. I kind of want this big
clump behind the house and then a few over here for contrast and it's really
fun to just start putting these pieces in. Oh, I like that right there, and maybe
some of this bright green moss I'll put it towards the front.
Now this moss you can see is pretty springy and just as it is it comes up
like halfway up the side of the house so what I found to do and notice I have not
baked my base yet, so I've baked all the individual components but I have not
baked this part, that of the ground that's in the teacup, because I might
want to shift things around. What I've got here is just some Poly Bonder which
does a really good job it's like a super glue but the great thing about it is
that once you put it in the oven it sets it cures it so it's perfect for polymer
clay. So I just applied some of that there and then I've got some of this
moss and I'm just going to kind of press this in
and you just give that Poly Bonder a few seconds and it grabs. I've also taken
some of these chips and made a little foundation around this house which is
awfully cute and I think I'm going to glue that succulent in there. So a bit of
poly bonder on the bottom of that, tuck that right in. Again, just hold it down
for a moment and it will grab, there. Now I should probably place some of my other
little houses, that one looks cute, and if you find that they're a little sunk down
you can grab some more of your ground clay and just build them up a little higher,
but I kind of like that. To make a stone foundation you want to choose oh the
tiniest of stones, I mean just just some teeny tiny stones.
So these biggest ones although they look very small, yeah, they're probably too big.
And you can try to manage these with tweezers I found there they're kind of
slippery. You just do this in small sections. So let's see, we'll start out
with one that's going to go on the side here. Put some of the Poly Bonder on and
what I found works best is kinda drop it in the vicinity of where you want it.
Hey that worked out pretty well, and I found this tool, this is part of a wax
carving set, and I love this little paddle because I could kind of get a
hold of those stones and press them in around the house. Let's let's choose one
to go by the front door.
Again, I'm just kind of dropping it and wow, it is working out well, and then using
this flat part of the tool, just kind of press it in place. Some will need more
pressing than others. Then you just build up around your
houses to make a little foundation if you want to. You don't have to, it just
it looks more finished to me to do that. And then you go ahead and glue in all
your little pieces. Maybe I'll put a bunny over here towering over the house,
put some bunnies, put some ladybugs, I'll probably mark the holes with an awl to
get my arbor in the right place. I may glue one of the ladybugs on the
handle or on the rim, that would be cute. So you just tuck in bits of moss... I may
put this, let me cut this down a little and put this here it's like a little
forest behind that red house. Tuck in and all your bits and pieces, your additional
flowers can maybe be little flower beds around the house. And by the way, if
you're interested in the supplies I used click on the tag in the upper right
or the link in the description box to go to my blog post. I have, for every video I
have a blog post with a supply list and links to products for you. That's the
question you guys ask me the most so make sure you go ahead and check that
out. So have fun creating your little fairy
village, making it personalized and exactly the way you want it. Happy
creating, bye bye.
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