Fairy House Workshop

In this workshop using locally gathered shells, stones, dried flowers and other natural materials learn the step-by-step process to create little fairy houses for your home or garden.  It’s all in the details so be prepared to get your hands and clothes a bit dirty and sparkly!  Please, bring your own hot glue gun with plenty of sticks (at least 12) and your preferred gardening shears strong enough to cut sticks with the same diameter as a pencil.  Instructor provides the natural materials and the base, but you are also welcome to bring a few of your favorite shells, rocks and other small keepsakes to add to your magical fairy house.

Along the quiet beaches of New England and wandering through the forest, Samantha Barlow-Beamer grew up closely with nature on her doorstep.  It was during a trip to Monhegan Island off the coast of Maine when her creative inspiration for building fairy houses and designing jewelry really took off.  Monhegan Island has one rule which five-year-old Samantha never forgot and still follows today: You must only make fairy houses with natural materials which have already fallen to the ground.  So, for the next 30 years or so she did just that.  At the bases of trees across the US and Costa Rica where she lived for a summer, Samantha built little fairy houses in the hopes to keep her childhood magic very much a part of her life. The one place she had trouble building fairy houses was in New York City where she lived and worked for ten years as a sales director for a UK based corporate consulting firm and later at a different consulting firm where she developed and launched a software integrated with AI. Trees are hard to come by in New York City, so she packed up her sticks and beads and moved back to the shoreline where she found her husband.  Now with their two cats and their toddler, the family travels through New England gathering natural materials for her fairy houses and visiting antique stores searching for beads to repurpose for jewelry.  Sometimes she gets very lucky when her aunts send her shells from tranquil Caribbean beaches and bark from their local forests; all of which get repurposed for her artwork.  In addition to her loyal partnership with Spectrum Gallery who discovered her in 2023, Samantha will be featured in the 2024 Wee Faerie Village at The Florence Griswold Museum.  Her art is designed to remind collectors of the beauty of nature and inspire them to continue to do what they can to preserve our incredible planet and respect our natural ecosystems.