The Wisconsin Gardener

Okay, you're done pruning you've grafted as many trees as you want. You still have sticks and twigs in the backyard. I bet you never thought you would make these. This is a faerie bed. I'm with it's creator, Tatiana Katara. Tatiana is an artist from the Spring Green area. Many of her beautiful creations are on display here at the Long Branch Gallery in Mineral Point. But, Tatiana, you've also started to branch out. I mean, you've got some of your faerie furniture all over the country now. I'm showing in Santa Fe and I give workshops in various places, as well. In fact, that's how we met, I took your workshop. And now I'm having a delightful time playing with this stuff. But you've made faerie beds, what else have you made? I've made faerie pirate ships. I modify dollhouses and do all of the rooms. Anything that you can imagine that exists in the world, you can make. Chairs, lamps, tables. We're going to start with something simple today just a simple faerie bed if there is such a thing. I think the first thing you taught me was it can't be green wood. It needs to be dried wood. I prefer to just take them off the ground or the floor. But if you need to clip something you can dry it out on your heat register or let it sit in the sun for a couple days. Glue doesn't like to stick to wet things. I use hot wood glue. You can get it in cool glue, as well, for children. For kids, yeah. Glue guns are $2 to $7, something like that at almost any craft store. I've even seen them at the hardware store. Right, so what you're going to do is just start out by making a bed frame. This is the part the faerie sleeps on. I've purposefully made this go beyond this. So, it's kind of like a tic-tac-toe board. The reason why is because I'm going to want it to adhere my leg to at least two different points. More stability that way. So it gives me stability, exactly. So, you make your frame and just glue that. You can use a brad nailer, if you happen to have one. Most of us will probably start out this way. So, you make your frame and that's what you have. The next thing you need to do is to make the mattress. So, I lay it down and make these little marks so that I know where to cut the corners out. The reason why I do that is because I don't want to have fabric in the area where I'm going to be gluing. Once you cut out your corners, it's going to look like this. It's notched. You just wrap this around real tight. Pull it tight, like you're stretching a canvas. Do a line along there. Don't worry about the bottom. Nobody's really going to be looking at it so you don't have to make it nice. Once trick I've noticed from using this and maybe being new to using a glue gun is a little dish of ice water comes in very handy when you glue your fingers and they start melting! If the glue comes through, just go like this. Don't sit there and glue your finger to it. Right, that's how I learned that. So, now what I've done is I've started putting a few of the legs on. You're not really measuring you just kind of hold them up and eye-ball them. I just cut them, I don't really care. I do care if it's level, so I just guestimate it. Later on, you can clip off a little bit at the bottom just a tiny bit, don't give it a bad haircut. Then, just glue your leg on. This is where it gets creative. You've got some simple leg posts but now you're adding the fantasy part of this bed. Right, and make sure you glue to both sticks. So that it sticks. And if you have extra glue that's sticking out there you can just shove a little moss in there. It kind of hides it. You can buy that at craft stores, as well. You can use the real moss, but I know it fades. The craft store moss tends to be greener. I think you said you painted it. I spray paint it, actually, with green paint. I put little flowers, like this. Actually, before I do that I really like to make my bed and do the flowers last. So, I make my bed with some fabric. I just think about what looks nice together. This is where it's fun, too. You can use an old shirt or recycle leftover pieces of an old curtain or something. These are from an old patchwork skirt that I had. I have all kinds of things that match. Then, what you're going to need to do at the bottom is you have to notch these out, as well. Just like we did with the mattress. Then don't wrap them all the way around just kind of glue it right to there. So we have a bedskirt basically. Exactly, then you can take lace and you could put it across the top like this so it looks like a fancy sheet folded over. Look at the pile of miniature pillows you've got, too. You could put lace along the bottom so you can make it look like a dust ruffle. Or you can make dust ruffles, too with the same fabric so it matches. You know what, I think, as a gardener the part I like the best is the decoration part because this is where I can go out into the backyard. Here, this makes a fantastic little miniature flower. Sea shells, old seed pods, nuts, pebbles. This is where you could walk in the woods and discover things to decorate. What would you use that for? I would use that for a lamp. Maybe even hang it off the bed or have a freestanding lamp next to the bed with a table and legs. We have so many choices. I assume these are your miniature pillows here, too. I make those myself. I make them out of a similiar kind of fabric. I like to make a lot of them so I can choose. However you do it gives it a different look. My bed will never look this good at home but that is where this is fun. I can get it out doing it this way. I don't make my bed at home, but I do love making these beds and kids do, too. That's a beautiful touch. You've got something else that I just love to play with. You've got it in your hand right now. These are skeletal leaves. They really just make the bed, actually. They make the fantasy of it, you know, just beautiful. You could do a four-poster bed with these all the way around. Sure, you could have a canopy. These are available at craft stores, too. You don't have to look in the woods for them. We're going to take a look at other things you've done. Thank you so much.