How To Invite Fairies to Live in your Garden (Tutorial)

There are Fairies at the Bottom of My Garden!

Fairy magic adds enchantment to my gardening life

Wegman's Nursey ( Redwood City)  helped me prepare for fairies

How To Invite Fairies to Live in your Garden

Ice plant and succulents enhance this tea party garden

1)Find a nice pot - I got mine in my Wegman's Fairy Garden Class /Workshop.
 You might get creative here and re-purpose a pot, large bowl, can, or any open vessel you already have. Fairies are not picky. Make sure you have a hole in the bottom, or some kind of drainage.
2) Fill the pot nearly full with potting soil

3) Decide on a story you want to tell in your garden - the sleeping green fairy below had a very warm bike ride to a cool lake. He parked his cycle, walked across the stepping stones over the lake, and is enjoying a  snooze next to some frog friends on a leaf that's big enough to serve all of them as a little island bench in the lake
4) Pick out a few little outdoor or indoor plants to enhance the story. Tiny ground cover  plants might work well. In my Wegman's class, I included Australian violets/Australian bluebell and some Irish moss. I had some spider plants at home that had shot out spider plant babies, so I added several of those as well. 

In other fairy habitats - such as the tea party themed one above - I've been using (flowering) ice plant, thyme and a lot of the succulents I've been repurposing from pots. With these I often use pea gravel to fill in as a natural stream or landscape. Non-miniature plants like geranium/pelargonium and iris stems can stand in for trees.

5) Find a fairy, and some items that she or he might enjoy. I used a

There are Fairies at  the Bottom of My Garden

fairy, a leaf bridge with frogs, and a fairy bicycle. You could also use little toys - like tiny dolls. You don't even have to include a fairy. Just creating the perfect environment , may well encourage a fairy to move in with you. Just because you don't see one, doesn't mean they aren't living there.
 6) Rocks, gravel, broken pottery shards, sand and other textures add greatly to the story. In the Fairy Garden class I went too we had access to crushed blue and green glass (you can buy bags of it) and broken shards from a turquoise pot. Those items made me think lake when I spotted them.

Waiting for fairies Just because you don't see them, doesn't mean they aren't living there.

Fairy garden is in-progress - keeping my eyes peeled for additions

If children live in or visit your house, make sure they have access to and maintenance rights over the fairy garden.

My fairy gardens live on my patio. I hand water them when it gets dry. Small garden like these are great during our drought, because they takes very little water. In fact, when we often re-purpose leftover water from other domestic events for watering our pots.

Books

Both these Disney Garden books inspire my theme gardening style, which is so vital for a fairy gardener. I like the tabbed-cookbook style of DISNEY'S GARDENING WITH MICKEY when I want to quickly review the steps for creating a hanging basket or well illustrated how-tos for small topiaries. (There's lots of good info for larger topiaries and garden sculpting as well - I just haven't tried it out) In addition, there is good gardening (yard or pots) basic techniques as well as many recommendations for plants that work well for specific themes and temperatures. I highly recommend it, because I have used it a lot over a period of several years.

I also turn regularly to my Secrets of Disney's Glorious Gardens book. It has a lot of similar techniques and information as DISNEY'S GARDENING WITH MICKEY and it also has lovely, lovely photos that inspire me. So when I want to sit down and just get ideas for themes or gardening styles, I pour through the photos in this book.
                

Fairy magic is adding enchantment to my life, when it comes to gardening.

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There are Fairies at the Bottom of My Garden

There are Fairies at the Bottom of My Garden-California Patio Garden that is)

Fairy magic adds  enchantment to my gardening lif

A Fairy Garden Tutorial 

There are fairies at the bottom of our garden!
They often have a dance on summer nights;
The butterflies and bees
Make a lovely little breeze,
And the rabbits stand about and hold the lights.
Did you know that they could sit upon the moonbeams
And pick a little star to make a fan,
And dance away up there
In the middle of the air
Well, they can!


There are fairies at the bottom of our garden!
You cannot think how beautiful they are;
They all stand up and sing
When the fairy queen and king
Come gently floating down upon their car.
The king is very proud and handsome;
The queen, now can you guess who that would be?
She's a little girl all day
But at night she steals away.
Well, it's me!

      "There are Fairies at the Bottom of our Garden" - Liza Lehmann, 1917

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liza_Lehmann

Enjoy the Comedy Julie Andrews singing There are Fairies at the Bottom of Our Garden

                     

Fairy magic adds  enchantment to my gardening life

Scraps: Scrunchies or Chou Chous? Green Sewing for the New Year

Two Completed Chou Chous
(along with a fabric covered book) I made for gifts

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Web Resources 

Enchanted by Sewing Show Notes and Links to Shows http://www.enchantedbysewing.blogspot.com/2014/12/ench-by-sew-027-festive-holiday-tees.html

Audio-Only Link http://ec.libsyn.com/p/7/1/3/713e354889f7b167/FINALcastFestiveTeaAndTeesdec2014.mp3?d13a76d516d9dec20c3d276ce028ed5089ab1ce3dae902ea1d06c98e3ed7cf5d5260&c_id=8063812

What is a Chou-Chou or a Scrunchie? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrunchie

Although I made chou-chous for holiday gifts, they are a perfect cleanup-for-the-New-Year or anytime, sewing cleanup/recycling project. You can't get more green than using up scraps of fabric that are too pretty to toss. You can also use the ends of stained or recycled clothing. You can even repurpose old worn elastic!

In the current - Festive Holiday Tees and Tea -  Enchanted by Sewing Episode (audio/podcast) , I described the process of sewing Chou-Chous, which are also known as Scrunchies. You can listen to that episode on your computer or download it to your favorite mobile device.

Here's the idea in picture form, to help you follow along with the Technicos segment of that show.

I can never toss really pretty scraps
But at some point, I need to use them!

I measure out 10 inches of 1/4 inch elastic

I fold a 20 (or slightly longer) tube of scrap fabric
This one isn't perfectly straight and it has one edge hemmed  as a result
of a long-ago project trim. No problem

I pieced on one extra scrap, to make the tube about the
right width
An extra seam at an odd place isn't a problem
when you are scrunching up the fabric anyway

 I cut a piece of string longer than the length of the tube

And lay it inside the tube, along the fold line

Stitch down one side of the tube and across just ONE open end
Make sure not to catch the string when you sew the long side
But DO catch it when you sew across the open end

At this point, I chose not to trim along the seam line,
to give a sausage-like look to the finished chou-chou

Push the sewn across end down into the tube

Pull the string end through the tube, so the outside pulls through

Note that this is a very thick, fabric like chou-chou
That's because I chose not to trim the seam after I sewed it,
to give that sausage-like appearance.

Remember, the chou-chou fabric tube should be about twice as long as the elastic,
so that the fabric scrunches up
You also want enough elastic to be able to double the band around the hair
Otherwise, it will slide off.

Open the sewn-across end, by snipping off the string
Now you have two open ends

Add a safety pin to your 10" of elastic
Pull the elastic through your tube

I set the zig-zab stitch on my machine

I caught up/secured my elastic end on both ends
with a zig-zag stitch.
Be careful not to lose the elastic ends  down either end of the tube, at this point!

Then I sewed the two secured ends together

When I doubled the finishing off seam back to get a neater finish
I broke my needle
So after that, I wrapped my second, neatening seam with a hand stitch
That takes less time than changing my machine needle!

Technicos:Embellishing a Tee - Machine Embroidery and Stabalizer

Woven stabalizer below
Film stabalizer on top
Then the top part of the hoop nests in
The part that attaches to the machine is beneath the tee

As I've mentioned in a past Enchanted by Sewing podcast , my machine embroidery is not accomplished using the latest, snazziest machine model. I use a Husqvarna Iris, which I purchased as one of the lowest end embroidery models about nine years ago. I bought my machine in August, as I'd been told this was traditionally a time when sewing machines are discounted. True? Maybe! Well, I'd always wanted a machine with this kind of capability and the somewhere around one thousand dollar price tag on this machine was possible because I'd made a little extra money the previous year. Husqvarna may consider this a budget-oriented machine, but for us it was a big ticket item.

My machine uses cards - no digital downloads. Those cards are no longer available for purchase from the manufacturer (a nine year-old machine is practically an antique these days). I found that out when I finally decided to break down and buy an additional card (I had one that came with the machine, and one that I had purchased for $150 when I bought the machine.) Luckily I found a few cards on EBAY for $50. I bought three. Would even more designs be fun? Would I like to be able to download digital designs or maybe learn to digitize my own? You bet! 

But am I satisfied with what I have for the time being? Yes. I don't spend my life, or even most of my sewing time, embellishing. So I am satisfied with what I have, and enjoy doing a little machine embroidery. I've also found that I enjoy repetitively stitching out certain designs like this dragonfly.  I can turn it different directions and make a bigger or smaller version.

I've also learned how to do machine embroidery on my tee shirt projects without getting the knit fabric stuck and gummed up under the needle (though I seam to recall it makes a pretty neat noise when this happens!).  

Here's what I do....

1) I hoop the back of the project with traditional stabalizer. Sorry I don't known what kind that is. It's the regular somewhat stiff, heavy kind I use for a woven cotton or linen. 
2) I put my hoop bottom piece below that sheet of for-wovens stabilizer, 
3) then I add my tee shirt. 
4) On top of the tee - and before I fit the top of the hoop in- I lay a piece of film-type stabilizer. 
5) The smaller hoop piece (it nestles inside the back/bigger hoop part that fits onto the machine) goes on top of that. Then I screw it in place and away I stitch. No more stuck needles and gummed up projects.

I hope this will help me and others
Locate this film stabalizer that tops off my tee shirt/knits
machine embroidery projects

I found my stabalizers at a Sewing Expo, at a booth that specialized in only that kind of product. I've noticed that sometimes it's hard to locate stabilizers in fabric stores, and when I do the clerks, even those who are also sewists, may not know about these products. So I plan to start taking better notes about what I've purchased the next time I get a chance to talk to a knowledgable vendor. If you know of links that explain what to choose and when, please post them or email them to me EnchantedBySewing  AT gmail.com.

Taking a tee-shirt beyond the basics with embellishment like machine embroidery, is one of many things that keeps me....

Enchanted by Sewing!

When Zippers Fly - September Sewing Basket

My September Sewing Basket is Singing Out To Me
Haloooooo, we're still full over here!

I'm still working away on completing the items in my September sewing basket.

Finally getting on with those sage-y green shorts. Yes, we can still hope to wear shorts here in the San Francisco Bay Area for another month or more. What is it about getting those fly front zipper techniques down? I'm going to review Trudy's fly-front zipper tutorial on youtube. Thanks again to Hot Patterns.

Why do they call it a "fly" on the front of the zipper?

From past experience, I don't think this zip will be flying off my machine that all quickly.

Buena suerte para mí!