"Mermaid Cove" Small World

For her first birthday, Claire got this Step2 water table from her Mémère, and two years later it's still one of her favorite things.  This is one of the simplest water tables out there, not a lot of bells and whistles, but what I love about it is the three separate sections that lend themselves so well to creating "small worlds".  A while back I created a dinosaur small world based on the one pictured here. 

Today's small world came to me when I was at the cake store, and I saw bins and bins of all these little plastic cake decorations.  Some of them are rings, some are cupcake picks, and some are just little figurines.  The palm trees are from the cake store also.  I paid less than $5 for all of it.

I would have liked to use sand in the big section of the table, but it would have been too hard to empty out (and save for future use) when we want to change it up, so I opted for pea gravel.

I really wanted aquarium gravel, but it would have been $8 at Walmart for two little bags and that probably wouldn't have been enough.  I got a giant sack of pea gravel from Home Depot for $4.  It was pretty dirty, so I had to do some work to rinse it out, and even then it still made the water a little murky.  But after a couple uses, hopefully it will be nice and clean.

The blue gems are from Dollar Tree (also used those in the dinosaur small world) and the flowers are from my craft stash, left over from a diaper cake that my aunt-in-law made for my baby shower.

The decorative rocks (also used in the dinosaur small world) were from my craft stash, I bought them years ago at Michaels and have re-used them over and over for various purposes.

After I put the water in, Claire started rummaging through her water toys and emerged with these aquarium plants that she got from a friend for her birthday.  I had totally forgotten about them! 

She dressed up her new Mermaid Cove with colorful corals, and her mermaid "Ariel" was happy as a clam.  *groan*  :-)