Back in January, Rosie posted on Instagram a few photos of her girls making flower fairy dolls from a kit I made for them. I noticed that a lot of her followers asked for a tutorial, so here it is! If you include little gifts in your children’s Easter baskets, these would be appropriate!
{All these photos, other than the one of my shopping bag, are Rosie’s!}
Oh so long ago, I had gotten (or someone had gotten, the details are lost in the mists of time) one of those Klutz kits that was truly inspired — a set of beads, artificial flower petals, and wire — and I have no idea why they discontinued them. They made such cute little fairy dolls, and the proof of just how delightful they were was that my girls made them about 20 or more years ago, played endlessly with them, and then their little girls started to play with those exact little dolls, that I kept because I couldn’t bear to throw them away! (Partly that is due to having my girls over a 14-year span, so it took a long time before my youngest, Bridget, was old enough for them to become officially “old toys.”)
I tried — believe me, I tried — to find that same kit. Rosie’s Molly had said to me last year, “I would be so happy if I could make some of these dolls!” What more incentive could a grandmother need?
But they were nowhere to be found.
Molly’s birthday came and went, but as Christmas came near, I was determined to make a kit for her and Deirdre’s little girl, who is the same age. I headed out to Michaels to do what it took to put it together, and that ended up with me convincing the manager to let me “clean up” the artificial flower department, which indeed had many, many hopelessly detached petals strewn in and under their display.
I can’t advise sending all of you out into the stores to crawl around, as yes, I admit I did, to snag free artificial flowers (and I hasten to add that I also replaced intact stems and rearranged misplaced ones too, as well as picking up in my shopping bag, with permission, what to the store was just trash!).
But I think that if you have a good coupon, you can get a fair assortment of stems and put together a good kit. If you look at the sprays of flowers, you see how they are constructed — you just gently pull the petals and leaves off the plastic stems. I think if you went in with other moms, you could divide up what you get for a good assortment, because they sell them in bunches.
A few notes on supplies: I included two kinds of wire, and the thicker gold type was better than the thinner silver, which tended to break – the ideal wire is strong enough to provide some structure, but flexible enough to stand up to a lot of bending around without snapping.
Tacky glue is useful for securing petals and embroidery floss. A glue gun would be even better, but these girls are eight years old and maybe that’s a few years away.
You need some medium-sized wooden beads for the heads and some little plastic “perler” beads for the bodies. The embroidery floss is to wrap around the wire and to glue to the head for hair, which can be flowing, braided, and/or put up in a bun.
You think you need more instructions than these, but actually, if you just start making a body, you will see how it comes together. I just came across this blog post yesterday while I was pulling this together, that has the step-by-step photos we weren’t able to muster.
Honestly, Klutz should just resurrect their kit!
bits & pieces
- A noble apostolate: “The Sons of Thunder, a high school group for boys based at St. Raymond of Peñafort Church, Springfield, usually gets together for prayer and discussions about current events, theology and politics from a Catholic perspective… But the group added a unique hands-on service project recently, inspired by a visiting speaker: building about a dozen tiny caskets for stillborn or miscarried infants.” St. Raymond teens build, donate tiny caskets for miscarriage ministry
- I had a good and deep conversation with Marie Hanson on her podcast: Incorporating prayer into the home.
from the archives
liturgical living
St. Ludger, and Sunday is the Fourth Sunday of Lent — Laetare Sunday — a day to be joyful on this journey to Easter!
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