Fairy Garden Gazebo

Throughout last week, I worked on my fairy garden gazebo.

Most of these steps took about a day to dry.

First I painted the gazebo with some non-toxic stain, to give it a distressed look.

I saw that the stain did not cover some areas where it had been glued.

I was going to decorate it with moss anyway, so I covered those areas first.

I used hot glue, but super glue would probably have been better.

I also used pieces of plastic plants. 

I cut pieces of a fake fern leaf, to make little ferns.

I did not take a picture at this point.

But, that was a fun day of decorating.

The gazebo is supposed to cover a little bundle of wires by the pond.

It would need some kind of base that would raise it off the ground.

I planned to cover the base with little rocks from the dollar store.

Here is an idea from Pinterest, so you can see what I had in mind for the base:

At first I thought this plastic cookie container would work:

I painted it with beige acrylic paint as a background.

After trying it out, though, I did not like the way the pebbles would look, once glued down.

A few days later I went to the 99 cents store and found a very similar sized bowl.

This shape looked MUCH better.

Also here you can see gazebo now decorated with the moss bits:

Next I had to figure out how to glue the rocks to the bowl.

Hot glue does not look like grout or cement, and super glue would leave too many gaps.

I mixed up some sand-textured acrylic paste and beige paint to make a thick paste.

I should have started from the bottom, up!

I had to lay the gazebo flat on its side to keep the rocks from sliding.

This took a day to dry, but it looked OK.

It's a little rubbery, since it's made of acrylic medium. 

Next time I will try using actual grout, which I think the ideas used.

I did the other 3 sides on Sunday, this time starting from the bottom up.

This meant that I did not have to lay the gazebo on its side.

However, there was a slight gap at the top.

Now it's all finished.

I just need a day to place it in the garden and take more pictures!