This week, I worked on solidifying the structure of my Faerie Home. Last week I finished building the walls, but I began to notice that as the clay dried there were cracks, and some sections of clay were separating from the rocks as they dried. Ideally, I would fire the Faerie House in a kiln, but in addition to not knowing how the clay would act if fired with the rocks, I felt that the structure was too fragile to transport to the ceramics lab and leave for someone else to load into the kiln. So I thought, what else would animal architects use to seal their walls? My answer: glue, well not actually glue, but something sticky.
Lots of creatures, such as wasps and termites, use mixtures of plant matter, dirt, clay, and saliva to construct their homes. However, seeing as I am not able to produce enough saliva to completely cover my faerie house (and even if I could it would take far too long), I decided to use mod podge. First, I ground any pieces of dried clay that had fallen off of the house into fine dust and mixed it in with the mod podge, then filled in the cracks with the mixture.
Once that had dried, I covered the entire home in a thick layer of mod podge and let that sit. Once dry, I decided I wanted to lighten the color of the walls for aesthetic purposes, to resemble a traditional Irish stone cottage. I made a slightly watered-down mixture of white acrylic paint and used a balled-up paper towel to smear the paint over the stones. The stones and clay are still visible in some parts, as I did not want to completely cover the natural walls, but the paint gently lightened the look of the house and had the desired effect.
Once the paint had dried, I glued some fake moss (I know, not a found material, I’m sorry) in the divots between the rocks to give it an aged, forest-infused look. Now that the walls were complete, I turned my attention to the interior details. I had initially wanted to include a bathtub, chair, bookshelf, and fireplace inside the Faerie Home, but I did not properly plan out the dimensions of all of these and therefore will not be able to include all of them. I had decided that I would settle for a bathtub, fireplace, and chair, so I went to Goodwill in search of a suitable faerie tub. I ended up finding a small, teal glass, fish-shaped container, which fit the bill perfectly.
However, once I got home and started configuring the space, I decided it made more sense to make the fish dish into a bed and have the house include a bed, fireplace, and stool. So I stuffed the dish with green wool for bedding and sewed a small pillow with scrap fabric and also filled it with wool, then cut another piece of scrap fabric into a blanket, which I tucked into the bedding. I tested how much weight it was able to hold by resting two of my selenite crystals on it and tucking them into the bed. This coming week I will start working on building the fireplace and framing the roof!
https://blog.nationalgeographic.org/2014/01/27/5-animals-that-are-awesome-architects/