A little favor to ask - and a fun little fairy tree!

I know we haven't known each other all that long but you all are so sweet and helpful I thought I'd ask for just a teeny tiny little favor.  I would just love to reach 50 GFC followers and 150 Twitter followers by my birthday this weekend.  So could you please, pretty please, with sugar on top...put the word out to your peeps about my little blog?  I'm also now on Tumblr (haven't found a button to add here for that yet), Pinterest and Google+.  And there are buttons for Linky Followers, RSS feed subscribe and email subscribe.

If you are a lurker who has the page bookmarked, thank you so much for coming back - did you know there is an easier way to follow blogs you like and know when fresh content has been posted?  If you aren't active in other social media accounts like Twitter, you can get updates right in your email inbox through email subscribe and RSS feed subscriptions.  This will save you all that time coming back to blogs to check and see #1 if there is new content and #2 if the new content is relevant to you on that day.  Hint, hint - following in any of the above mentioned ways also helps bloggers know how many folks are really visiting and returning (as in, continue to find my content valuable and interesting!) and it helps build the credibility of the blog to other readers.

So enough begging for now and on to the fun stuff!  :)  You may know how much my daughter and I have gotten into the "fairy garden" thing.  If you haven't seen the tour of our fairy garden and the pictures from our annual fairy day trip, be sure to take a look.  Several years ago we made a fairy tree craft at the fairy day event at Heavenly Scent Herb Farm and it was so much fun we have talked about making others ever since.  

As with any crafter/sewer, a collection of buttons and beads and odd little pretties accumulates over the years.  I remember my grandma's button jars and how we would pilfer them for making dolls and tack for our Breyer model horses.  My daughter is a borderline hoarder - anything can be recycled and made into something - so we had an assortment of fancy hair things that had broken, broken bracelets and necklaces, Perler bead projects that had come apart, etc.

When we hit garage sales this spring I found this remnant of green coated wire I thought would be the perfect structure for the trunk of the tree.

So I took the wire and bent it in different lengths roughly the length of my arm from elbow to hand until I had a bundle like this (and yes, I am sitting in bed after work one night watching Food Network Star...lol).  One end of the wire was at the bottom and one was at the top.  I took the end at the bottom and started wrapping it clockwise around the other wires.  Then I took other wires and kept bending clockwise until I had a twisted trunk and loops of "roots" hanging out the bottom.  I took the end of the wire from the top and bent it down around the outside and tucked it in the truck to secure the trunk.  Then I took the "roots" and bent them at an angle away from the trunk so the tree could stand on its own.  I took the top "branches" and started bending the loops at odd angles and loops to form the top of the tree until I ended up with this.

I took a small gauge jewelry wire and strung different lengths with beads and buttons and other fun objects and secured them to the tree - sometimes from one branch to another and other times dangling and twisted in curly shapes.  I also used the jewelry wire to hang individual larger objects.  I did this while the kids were napping but its a good one to put them to work on for an hour too.  :)

My daughter decided this was the perfect spot for our fairy tree and that it was a great spot to play with her Schleich animals.