Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Hodge creates faerie village in spare time
BELLA VISTA — When Jim Hodge partially retired, he found that he did not enjoy having time on his hands. That led to an interesting hobby.
“I started making birdhouses, and you can only make so many birdhouses,” he said.
He and his wife, Norma, were staying home due to covid at the time, and he was looking for things to do. From building birdhouses, he moved on to building a faerie village.
“What I really like to do is repurpose old things,” he said. “Junk is treasure in the eye of the beholder.”
He said YouTube is full of people who make faerie villages. He made one structure and then another, and then it evolved as he discovered new techniques and materials, he said.
His first piece, a house, is kept indoors and is made from a repurposed bottle with a mossy piece of wood as the base. He purchases some of his materials at Hobby Lobby, like shingles for the roof. Another piece that is kept indoors is a chateau, a German Tudor-style home that has a functioning light on the front. It features a tiny piano on the lawn and two chairs for listeners of an imaginary piano recital. The materials are Styrofoam and paper clay.
Hodge has also made a couple of pieces for children as his craft has evolved. The most recent one that he was preparing to ship to a little girl featured a faerie named Raindrop and her house on a base with greenery. He was enclosing a letter and a poem by Shawn Cronick that is about “hope and courage and the moral compass you want your children to have,” he said.
Outside the home is the main attraction in a modified flower bed. Near the center of the village is a castle that is modeled after a famous German castle. Hodge said a Disney castle is also modeled after the famous castle. There are two structures that are unmistakably hobbit holes. Hodge explained he built a residence for Mr. Baggins, but then because Mr. Baggins went on a journey and became famous, he needed a larger home, so he built a bigger one. A church, a farm with a silo, a train track and a river also contribute to the sense of community, along with a few little people made of polymer clay. Some of the materials are purchased while others are upcycled.
Just above the village is a lattice where Hodge has expanded vertically and placed several faerie homes.
“I was running out of real estate,” he said.
The hanging houses are made of glass jars covered in polymer clay. Other materials used in the village include cardboard and fiberglass.
Hodge is currently working on populating the village with people and making more houses for the lattice.
He and Norma are both retired stockbrokers and he was an investment banker. They had a financial services company with a tax practice in Las Vegas before moving to Bella Vista. They purchased an RV and traveled the country while running their business for 10 years. When looking for a place to settle, they had clients who talked them into looking at Bella Vista, and it turned out to be the perfect place, Hodge said.