As soon as I saw the(adorable) lil’ mushroom house that I saw here I knew I had to make my own.
I used empty oatmeal containers the way Valerie did but I covered ours in some of the kid’s old paintings.I sewed mushrooms caps for them out of old t-shirts that were too raggedy for the donation pile.
The girls love playing with these and I was able to make some fairies to go with them and also a few landscapes which turns this into a nice little play-set.
The landscapes also came from t-shirt scraps and were super simple to make up, I just cut the shapes I wanted and stiched them on.
I made our fairies from corks, fabric bits and paper and I wrote more about that here but it’s a pretty simple process.
I also made some little forest people from a baking soda dough recipe that I found here. I formed the bodies, dried them out in a 200 degree oven and then painted them with acrylics. They get played with a lot and have held up pretty well, we had one break but it was repaired with all-purpose glue and that’s still holding up.
Gizmo doesn’t use these the way I thought she would- she usually doesn’t use the mushroom caps as caps but prefers them as beds or doors instead.
She also likes to stack the oatmeal containers on top of each other to form a tower. I’m hoping to make a few new mushroom caps with cardboard inside to make doing this easier.
Right now they work okay but there is an occasional topple that can be frustrating.
I keep the play set in our kitchen drawer and Gizmo also has access to shells, marbles and play dough to further expand her play when she wants to.
A good thing about this play set is that the pieces can be rearranged differently whenever it gets played with- if shells are used one day they might not be the next- sometimes there a little pond in the village,,,, sometimes there’s not. But my favorite thing is listening to Gizmo when she is playing with this set and all of the interesting stories that she gives to the fairies. It puts a really big smile on my face because the stories are her own not what she’s picked up from a television show or a movie. She’s not inhibited by what someone has told her the character has to be, she’s deciding on that herself.
lovely Friday nature table linky-hosted by The Magic Onions
