Fairy Doors

[kickassangel]

Me & my friends have decided to make some 'fairy doors', some of them to go in our dc's rooms & some to sell to raise money for charity. We live near Ann Arbor in Michigan, where it is a bit of a local 'thing' (if you google fairy doors, then Ann Arbor gets mentioned a lot).

However, we are having quite some discussions about how to make them - they don't need to open & we don't want them to look too much like 'real' doors, so won't be using doors from dolls houses.

We DO have someone whose husband has the equipment through work to make multiple doors from wood, and quite a few of us do craft things.

BUT, if you were going to make/buy a fairy door, how would you like it to look? What sort of things would you use to decorate it? What materials would you use & how best to stick things on? Lots of us have done card making, but wood is different, so paint, glue etc would need to be different?
Does anyone know how to make realistic moss, grass etc? How would you stick them to a bedroom wall (without causing permanent damage)?

Hope you can give us some practical advice. We've looked at loads of pictures online, but just wondering about what would be popular for selling & how to make it so that it won't fall apart.

SOME of them may end up outside, so need to be weatherproof.

I have been meaning to make a fairy door for ages.

I would want it tolook realistic,and be hardwearing (so nothing stuck to it that will fall off, be pulled off etc.)

I was going to glue mine to the wall with a glue gun, thisdoesn't damage the wall, the most it will do is pull off a bit of plasterthat can be replaced easily.

Have you thought about skirting? I have skirting so if I make a door I would ideally like a little flight of steps up the skirting, otherwise it will look silly (not that a fairy door will look silly anyway )

They should be made out of wood I think

If you live near Ann Arbor then aren't there loads of people making and supplying fairy doors and wouldn't all the information you need be available locally?

there's a few fairy doors in & around the city - you can get a list & go round to them, but they've all been made individually by the owners, all different etc, no supplies near by.

there's an art shop in our small town which has an annual fairy door competition & people really make an effort, but they sell for 100s, and some of the techniques used are closely guarded secrets.

we're hoping to come up with 2 or 3 basic patterns, which we can then individualise & sell with something that sticks them to the walls.

one of my friends has a rockery/water garden with a fairy door in it, but then her son's a landscape gardener, so she got some help with that.

That's such a great idea, never seen those before!

I bought a fairy door for my sister, and the only way you could make it suitable for outdoors was to varnish it.

It was wooden, olde-fashioned ("cast-iron" detailing - big hinges, ring handle - you could prob just paint on).

Model railway suppliers might be a good source of realistic looking grass (prob look more like moss at that scale) etc