Pine Cone Fairies

Hello........... I have a fun make to share with you today, one of the themes for our craft club exhibition is Fairies and I just could'nt resist having a go at making some from pine cones.

The idea kind of mushroomed from the Magic wool fairies book I have by Christine Schafer, I made my first felted fairy 'here' last summer and since then with relapses I've not really got any further with felting, but when I found some pine cones in the Christmas box inspiration hit, Pine cone fairies !!!! I just needed to make some,  I  had some wooden heads, pipe cleaners and sequins in my stash and a idea what more could I need.....

Well the answer to that it turns out is lots and lots of different glues, as I discovered it really hard to get things to stick to pine cones after a lots of trail and error I finally used lock tight super glue and even then some fairy decapitations still happened eek !!!!

Once the head was on I made some pine cleaner arms and added pretty beads to each end for my fairies hands.

The arms were much easier to attach as you can just bend them around and through the cones and they stay in place.  I then used pva to glue some felt hair to my fairies head, I knotted it in the middle using baker twine to make a hanging loop, now you really have to wait quite a while for the glue to dry at this stage, if not you risk a bald headless fairy situation. !!!

I then added a pretty flower to cover the knot in the bakers twine and set about styling my fairies hair

Next up I used some leaf sequins to make some sparkly wings I used glue dots to gradually build up the wings, then I had the same old problem of what sticks to a pine cone ? as the surface is so uneven, this time I used sticky foam pads to build up a flat surface.

and thankfully that was enough to hold the wings in place.

Ta-Dah

Fairy number one 

I then decided to make a male fairy giving him a wizard like beard and pointy felt hat

I made him a larger set of wings and this time I wrapped the pipe cleaner arms in some silver sparkly yarn.

Ta-Dah

Isn't he a cutie, I love how much personality these little fairies have.

Last up I made a purple fairy, this time I made her some pretty paper wings with added sparkles I also wrapped some ribbon around the cone and added extra sparkles.

These fairies really are a lot of fun to make, after a bit of hairstyling my final fairy was ready.

Ta-Dah

So all my fairies are now on display in the local library and I was pleased to discover today that they all still have there heads, I did a bit of head testing at home before hand as I was a bit worried that the heads might come off and scare the children I envisaged going into the library and finding 3 severed fairy heads hanging on the branches and all the bodies fallen to the ground yikes............

But it was all OK, here they all are safe and sound hanging out with some woodland friends.

Happy Crafting

Clare xx