D.I.Y. Fairy Treehouse

D.I.Y. Fairy Treehouse

Greetings! I had been posting our progress of this project on my Facebook page and was asked by several to put together an easy peasy tutorial on just how we made the treehouse for our little fae friends...soooooo.....

First off, supplies we used:

Cardboard....and lots of it...luckily, we had just moved when we started this venture, and still had a plethora of boxes stacked about. This in a way helped motivate me to continue unpacking, as I was eyeballing some of the best boxes, knowing that it was far easier to work with them once emptied. :)

An empty oatmeal container. The cardboard, Quaker type...whatever the larger size is, as I can't remember how many ounces. This is optional, you can simply roll some cardboard up to fashion the bottom trunk part of the tree, but I found the oatmeal container easy and sturdy.

Aluminum foil. Raid your kitchen pantry, and make sure you have lots of it. It is what forms the main bark like shape of the tree trunk.

Masking tape, to cover the aluminum foil, and thus make the paper mache stick to the trunk's shape. (The thick kind is best, but of course I didn't happen to have any, and was forced to use thin, which works fine, but takes a bit longer.)

Hot glue gun and lots of glue sticks.

Acrylic Paint in good tree colors.

Elmer's white glue, or tacky glue. I used plain old Elmer's, as my oldest daughter had just brought her school supplies home for summer vacation and it's what we had about the house.

Paper towels. Lots of paper towels.

A large bowl in which to make your glue and water mache mixture.

Extras. I used a polyester sheet moss, some craft vine, little round wooden discs to fashion the table and chairs, twigs from our yard to make the fairy bench, polymer clay to make mushrooms, plastic willow branches for the canopy of the tree...it all depends on what manner of embellishments you wish to add to your enchanted part of the mini forest. :)

Ok...let's get started.

The first thing we did was bust out the hot glue gun and fashion a cardboard base which would become the ground/grass. To this we attached the oatmeal container, having cut out a front doorway and window where we wanted them. We glued the bottom of the container to the cardboard base, saving the oatmeal container lid to attach the top cardboard balcony.

We then cut a little hole in the oatmeal lid, then traced it onto the cardboard which would become our balcony, so that the fae had a little area to flutter up and down the interior of the trunk from one level to the other. On both the base and the balcony, I doubled the cardboard layers for stability, as this was to be a toy, not merely a decorative piece. We added little cardboard pieces where we would build out the roots at the trunk's base, and a small little awning type piece above the window which would help form the illusion of a knothole.

We toyed with the idea of leaving the lid of the oatmeal container unattached, so that the top level could be removed or pivoted, but ended up simply securing them together with hot glue. This turned out to be a wise decision in the end, as it ended up on the large side, and when moving the finished treehouse from room to room, the stability is now a huge plus. For the stump piece that is above the balcony, I simply rolled up some cardboard, as I did not have another oatmeal container. I must point out that at all stages of this project, I had two little girls positioning their fairy dollies (we love the Bayala figurine collection from Schleich! Amazing detail AND so very durable!) about their future home to make sure that it would be suitable lodging. :)

The next step was to foil the trunk and form the main shape of the trunk. Unfortunately, I forgot to take pics of this step, but basically, you take long pieces of aluminum foil, scrunch them up, and hot glue them to your trunk to give it the shape you desire. If you look at the pictures below, and imagine the mess of foil that is hiding beneath the masking tape, you'll get the idea.

That of course brings us to the masking tape. Basically, just cover the entire surface of the aluminum foil in tape. The only real purpose the tape serves is that it gives the paper mache layer something to adhere to, as it will not stick to the foil directly. It needn't be perfect. You can see ours was not. But all the foil must be covered with tape.

For the top 'canopy' part of our tree, which is totally optional, we busted out yet more cardboard and made something which we dubbed 'The Turtle Shell'. It was nothing more than a mess which somehow managed to take shape. I stuffed some paper grocery bags into the top to fill it out some and hold shape during the paper mache process. It ended up looking something like this:

Next, is the fun and messy part. :)

We used simple paper towels which my hubby had to grab while getting an oil change, since I called him in a panic when I realized that we had none left in the house. I don't remember what brand they are, but they were on the sturdy side, which you will want, as you will be yanking and sliding the paper towels into place to get the look you desire. 

For the mache paste, we used simply Elmer's white school glue and water. I didn't worry really about the ratio of each, I just added glue and water until it looked like a good, pancake batter type consistency going. I then took a large stack of paper towels, cut them in half, and began covering the entire thing with gooey stuff. (If your fingers start to stick to the paper towels when applying them, just dip those digits into the paste mixture them smooth them over the trunk to make a nice mess.)

We covered the turtle shell also, so that it would stand up to play and become a nice base upon which to glue branches. Note, we did not mache the balcony floor, as we wanted it to remain smooth for our painted wood texture.

Luckily, when we did our mache, it was relatively nice outdoors, so the big gooey mess was able to sit out on the deck to dry. Be sure to let your structure DRY COMPLETELY! If you do not, you could end up with a moldy mess in the future, and thus all of your efforts shall be thwarted. :(

Next up, PAINT! 

Honestly, you can choose whatever paint colors you wish. We used what we had around the house and steered away from flat out brown in the hopes of giving it a more realistic look. The best way to tackle the bark is to give it a nice base coat of whatever you choose as your dominant hue. We went with a grayish, brownish, whatever we could mix together to ensure we had enough paint to cover all the bark areas. Once that dried, we dry brushed on some highlights of various colors. Once THAT dried, we then took some very very very watered down black and worked it into some of the nooks and crannies for lowlights. For the interior, we went with a nice brown, and made the balcony floor close to the same hue, then added details.

After painting, we gave the entire thing a generous coat of Mod Podge (we used matte, but as you can see, it still has a somewhat glossy appearance. I'm not overly fond of this, but like I mentioned earlier, this is a piece for play, and thus I focused on non toxic materials.)

For the turtle shell, I basically just took whatever left over paint we had and tried to make it 'good enough' as it would be laden with branches in the end.

After a couple more coats of mod podge...which was probably overkill, but I have an almost 3 year old who is less than gentle on things...we glued on our sheet moss 'grass', and to cut down on shedding it got a coat of spray adhesive. Now, if I could do this step over, I would skip the adhesive, as it did not dry properly in areas, as I got it too thick, plus it did not want to dry well, so I ended up mixing together more mod podge with water, and covering the 'grass' with it, using a sponge and big paint brushes. This was done a few times, until it looked as if it would not be easily pulled off or shed all over my house. Yes, the grass is stiff and doesn't have a 'soft' feel, but it will stay put, and since the fairies are vinyl, I don't think they mind too terribly much.

From here on out, it's all about detail. We affixed a myriad of objects, like bendy fake vine, little mushrooms we had sculpted and painted (again coated with mod podge) and our plastic willow branches. After all of these things were attached to the trunk, I coated it all AGAIN in watered down mod podge and let dry overnight. From there it was merely down to attaching our long willow branches via my beloved glue gun to the canopy, and tada! We had our treehouse ready for playtime!

(Note: We never did finish the bottom edge of the grassline...and yes, there are some visible hot glue spots, BUT, the girls love it as is, so while I had originally planned on tackling these issues, I think I may now just leave them as is. It's homemade, and it is allowed to have flaws.)

Already, the fae have moved in...along with some dragons, a human King and Queen, and even a stray giraffe. It has seen many hours of play, both indoors as well as outdoors, and we are proud of our creation. If you decide to take the plunge and do this yourself, know that it's not so difficult as it looks. This was our first project of this like and it was great fun. Just dooooooo eeeeeettttttt!

~Avalonnae~