Ancient Web: Phee McFaddell Built a Fairy Workshop in 1999 HTML

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Phee McFaddell's web persona is a little preoccupied with loose pixels, disappearing fairy habitats, and a cat that turns into a twenty-foot creature. Those are fairly good reasons to give her an entire corner of the Web.

Visit the Whimsical Realm of Phee McFaddell.

The homepage offers a colorful maze of picture-book stories, puppet crafts, coloring pages, newsletters, a guestbook, and an artist's gallery. It greets visitors as though they are entering a fairy-tale workshop, not a product catalogue.

The Who Is Phee? page lets the character speak for herself. She explains that the World Wide Web might provide refuge to fairies, elves, and other imaginative beings displaced by buildings and deforestation. The explanation is fictional, but the purpose is sincere: encourage readers to exercise imagination and make things themselves.

Printer paper was the craft platform

The craft-project index is remarkably deep. It links fairy puppets named Puck, Peaseblossom, Mustardseed, and Cobweb, along with unicorns, dragons, witches, pirates, butterflies, holiday boxes, masks, and coloring projects.

The individual designs are not merely gallery images. The index offers puppets and companion coloring sheets meant to be printed, cut, colored, and assembled. Pages feature original artwork and character names rather than one generic stock illustration after another.

A site visitor could follow a link, print a project, and return to the page to look for another character. That paper-and-browser connection reflects the era before every children's craft came packaged as an app or video tutorial.

The surviving pages carry 1999–2010 copyright dates, and the homepage identifies its most recent update as January 3, 2008. Those are visible markers of the site's period; they are not proof that every linked image still prints correctly.

There is a marketplace link, but the site is much more than a storefront. Its long menu preserves an independent illustrator's imagination, not just finished products. The guestbook and email invitation also place creative exchange at the center.

Most importantly, its old layout is part of the performance. To browse these little linked rooms is to participate in Phee's fictional world, where fairy doors exist because somebody decided they deserved a page.

Explore the original puppet and coloring-project index.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.