Make your own solar fairy houses

My daughter and I had so much fun making these solar fairy houses. The total cost was under $5. You will need a jam jar, a batch of air dry clay, paints and a solar pathfinder light. You may also want to decorate with stones, moss and spray with a sealer to finish.

First we made a batch of air dry clay. Click here for the recipe. Alternatively you can buy a block of clay from Bunnings or a craft shop.

We shopped around for different solar path lights and jam jars that would fit and settled on a lovely colour change light from Bunnings at $2.50. I had a new box of mason jars left over from different projects that I was planning on using but they were too small. Luckily I found two empty coconut oil jars that I’d saved as I liked the shape. An old plastic bottle would work too.

We took apart the solar path light, unscrewing it from the metal stake and opening the light section in order to activate it (pulling off a tab from the battery section). We placed the light inside the jar, with the top section overlapping the rim and glued it into place. We then started to place the air dry clay over the jar and pathlight being careful to avoid the solar panel. You may want to place masking tape over it.

We continued adding the clay all over the jar, pressing the clay firmly all over. As the pathlight was flat and not very mushroom shaped, we added extra layers to the roof section.

We scooped out large sections for the windows, rolled a small sausage of clay to make some window frames, added a door and spots to the roof. We left it to dry overnight and were really excited to see it light up as it got dark.

The next day we left them in the sun and they dried really quickly (it was a hot day). We had deliberated over using food colouring to dye the clay - you can spot some of the red we’d experimented with on the photo above. But we decided we’d prefer to paint them instead. As it’s air dry clay there is some shrinkage and cracking but we didn’t find there was too much. We glued on some moss to disguise them. When we were finished we sprayed with a weatherproof sealant but we think they’re probably best kept under cover.

We gave ours on our outdoor setting under cover.