Forest Whimsy opens an Etsy shop!

Forest Whimsy is my friend Lucille's company. She makes fairy houses, fairy dolls, furniture, and fairy crowns like this one here. Up until this week you could only get her beautiful hand made fairy accouterments from the select stores she sells them to. However, she has just opened an Etsy shop so you can now buy from her directly! The link to her shop can be found on her website here:

Forest Whimsy

My favorite thing she makes are the fairy crowns. However, I have often been painfully envious* of her ability to felt the prettiest fairy dolls from scratch, giving them the most wonderful dresses and hair-dos. Her fairy houses are exquisite and magical. One of the things she hears a lot when she takes her work to fairs is parents saying to their kids "We can make one just like this at home". I've seen proof of the crafty skills out there, so I know this may be true for some of you, but I would venture to suggest that no one can put together the kind of fairy architecture that Lucille does with quite as many charming innovations such as mica windows, lanterns, second stories, and she even does a gypsy caravan complete with snails to pull it!

*I want to point out that although I have been consistently envious of Lucille's ability to make magical things and also make a living doing it, which I have yet to do, this envy has not gotten in the way of our friendship. I just want you all to know that, generally speaking, I am able to feel envy of the gentlest kind. Seriously. No, really. I like to express that envy regularly to give it an airing, this keeps it from being toxic while allowing me to get the truth out of my chest. Something I recommend everyone to do more often.

**My oh my, have I gotten defensive about feeling craft envy?

***One thing I LOVE about Lucille is that while her hands create absolute magic, she makes just as big a mess as I do in her studio! Uh, she might clean hers up a little more often though.

****I'm just really in love with asterisk right now. I wonder if I should go to therapy about this? I have always been unaccountably charmed by parenthetical and asterisks. (I fell for parenthetical while reading Alice B. Toklas when I was about 12 years old. Gertrude Stein feels perfectly comfortable putting parentheses within parentheses. I can't help but admire a person who speaks with so many asides. It has also had a big influence on my writing style.)