Fairy House Faux Pas

Well, you know about Renaissance festivals? If you don’t, it is basically grown men in tights and heavy women with exposed bosoms spending the weekend in a mishmash nonexistent time period somewhere between the middle ages and the dawn of pirate furries.  I was introduced in high school performing with a madrigal choir group. Like most things related to high school, I remember the festival as being awkward and embarrassing, but overall enjoyable.

Long story short, in a fit of nostalgia, my fella and I were skimming the festival website for ticket info when we discovered a wonderful promotion; Submit a handmade fairy house in exchange for two free tickets.  What is a fairy house? We were not really sure, but you'll see how I imagined it in a minute.

So there we were, within the hour of discovering this wonderful catch-free promotion, scowering the woods, filling my purse with acorns, bark, pebbles, sticks, moss, and surprisingly sticky pine cones. I believe, at some point Dear Fella, said something like, “what if we have to submit the house early?” I think I answered with a shrug, followed by a shriek of delight over a particularly curly stick.

Riding a wave of artistic inspiration fueled by approximately 10 episodes of Upstairs, Downstairs & Downton Abbey (thanks as always, PBS) I came to produce this:

Dedicated to Downton.

I snapped some pictures and emailed them to the contact person about exchanging it for tickets. (Note: The story starts to get somewhat depressing at this point. If you don’t want to hear about me wasting upwards of 15 hours of my life, maybe just scroll on and look at the pretty pictures.) Yep. No exchanges on festival days, meaning I’d need to drive almost three hours there and back just to drop the thing off. 

Oatmeal Box Turret. 

Clay mushrooms on toothpick bottoms. Hand-painted.

 Here' a litte collage of fairy   house.  Totally superfluous fairy house. 

Made of super sticky pine cones. My hands were a disaster. Also, super time consuming.  Took like 2 episodes.

The chimney is a wonderful piece of driftwood.

-So, am I somewhat ashamed of the fact that I have that much time to devote to tiny house making. A little.

-Was I bummed that it was to no avail? Yes :(

-What the heck did I do with a fairy house? Dear Fella installed it in his school library. I believe he may have posited some tale about the book fairy in explanation.

-Did we go to the festival anyway? Yeah. We were so hyped about it!  We had a lovely day. Although we continued to be outraged that we didn't have free tickets the whole day. 

I say to thee man, no free tickets!? Tis an outrage!

So. Always call first, before investing massive amounts of time into questionable projects. Or don't and have the fun anyway. :) Huzzah!