Inspiration: Tze Ching Yeung and her fairy gardens

Hong Kong-born designer Tze Ching Yeung, is mama to two and the talented mind behind Jake & Maya Collective, a London-based company offering well-designed, sustainable clothing and products for children. Tze is super-talented and has sold her own designs in high profile stores such as Harvey Nichols, and online shops, such as AlexandAlexa.

Tze has been working her magic creating fairy gardens for her children, here she shares her work with us. An inspired idea for half term!

I was never ever into fairies as a child (or adult), but, actually, this is pretty fun. DIY fairy gardens bring a bit of magic and keep the kids busy outside looking for ‘bits’ and making.

Step 1: Find a suitable container, plants and bits

Starter kits (which include moss, fairy dust, toadstools, stone fairy, door) can be found at Fortune Faeries. They also sell component parts individually and beautiful fairies (a bit delicate for playing with though).

 

Step 2: Fill with soil and plants

To create an indoor garden, we lined an old suitcase with thick plastic before putting in mud and decorating with moss (about 1 bag of small starter kit). After we photographed this garden, we changed the plant shown to another more resilient one to avoid having to water it too often.

Step 3: Playtime!

Put in old ceramic pot or bowl to make a pond, then add little bits and pieces from the garden.

The secret door from Fortune Faeries was a bargain at £1.20.

We surrounding the sleeping fairy with mushrooms made using acorn caps and sticks.

Maya made me carry this big chunk of tree all the way home from our dog walk! It was pretty heavy. She wedged it all in with stones from our garden and filled it with gravel from the drive to stabilise it.

We made the swing from chestnut shell and string and the ladder is made from old canvas stretchers and string.

The platforms and details were added by the master gardener herself, using random objects found in the garden.  Undoubtedly there will be nests and bunting appearing on this tree pretty soon.

This part of the garden is a combination of DIY, bought and found.

We have a store of rainy-day supplies for the indoor garden from Fairy Garden Miniatures, plus lots of reindeer moss from our local garden centre). We’re also going to be trying out some fairy garden DIY projects from our Pinterest board.