DIY: Make Your Own Fairy Garden

You know that feeling when you’re in your favorite arts and crafts store and you stumble upon their seasonal aisle, stocked with creative projects just screaming your name? Yup. That feeling. The one that fills your heart (and your shopping cart) with good intentions. You imagine yourself rushing home, quick to start this new creative adventure—the finished project is perfectly pictured in your head. Heck, you might even let your kids participate!

That was me a few weeks ago when this perfectly merchandised shelf filled with miniature fairy garden supplies caught my eye. I just KNEW my seven and two-year-old daughters would be in heaven planting gardens for their tiny little—not to mention breakable—fairies to live in. And yes, of course, I bought the tiny rake/shovel kit and miniature wheelbarrow. What DIY fairy garden is complete without those must-have accessories?

With the help of my two friends Google and Pinterest, I figured out that most of these fairies live in terra-cotta pots (score), surrounded by succulent plants, which are very hard to kill (double score). So I headed off to our local home improvement store and filled my cart with all the garden necessities.

And now comes the fun part! As soon as we got home, I unloaded all my fairy goodness and showed my daughters what we’d be working on for the afternoon. Their pure joy as we unpacked all the little fairy props and started to get our hands dirty with the plants was worth every penny (about $75 worth of pennies) I spent for all the supplies. I went a little overboard on the plants and pots, so I’m pretty sure you could purchase everything you need for this project for under $50.

Here’s a fun trick. If you break the side of your pot, you can “plant” it into the dirt to give you more space for little fairy steps and add layers to your garden. I also used smaller pots to give it height and a fun stacked look.

To create the effect of the steps in the garden, we took a smaller pot and broke it into small pieces. We used the pebbles to create a path for the fairies to their front door. Every bit of this project was so much fun!

The girls loved every moment. I had to help with the plants a little, but they loved deciding where everything went and which fairies lived in which gardens. Most of our fairies are now legless (thanks to my toddler chucking them across the driveway), and I’m currently testing the theory that succulent plants are impossible to kill—I’m not sure I’ve even watered them since we finished the project!

Our DIY fairy gardens are proudly displayed on our back patio, and the girls love looking at them every day. They now have a few Disney princesses living in them too, and a few things have been moved around, but overall it was a wonderful weekend project and hopefully a fun memory for all three of us!