Making the World Cuter: Flashback-DIY Puppet Theater

It's moving week here! We are heading to beautiful Bend on Friday to start our year externship at the hospital so that my husband will finally be done with school! So that means a little break from blogging while I get the rest of the house packed and cleaned all while taking care of my babies and saying goodbye to pretty much the best friends ever! Rough week for us, but hopefully some of these old flashbacks are things you may have missed or forgotten about...

Thanks for reading, and I promise to be back soon with all new and fun stuff! If you have a tutorial to share-especially if it's something fun for the summer-send me an email and we'll get it up and featured!

xoxo

Tiff

Today's Flashback-DIY Puppet Theater-

My kids still LOVE this thing, it's one of the few things I left out after I packed up all of their toys! Begin flash back now....

I have been wanting to make my kids a puppet theater forever, but I have just never found the right piece of furniture to turn into one.

So I decided to build one myself. (with help from my husband of course, but I did do a lot of it, if not most of it myself).

Now it drives my hubby crazy but I don't ever start out anything with a plan, just an idea in my head and then I just make it work.

I went through our scrap wood-found 3 pieces of wood that were all the same size for the top, middle and bottom and then I cut a 2x3 (I think) in half.

I measured the 2x3's width, doubled it and cut that much off of the middle board so that it would fit between the two pieces of wood and then screwed it all together.

Here is the side view, you can see I just drilled screws in the top and bottom pieces down into the posts and then through the side of the post to attach the middle piece. Pretty easy...if you can just get those darn screws started! :)

Then I painted it white...well the first coat anyway, my hubs finished the painting process for me, one because I am not a patient person when it comes to painting and two because my finger hurt after the first coat! :)

We went back and forth for a day or two, trying to decide how to stable it, we thought of a sort of a-frame brace, some sort of hinged brace that would fold up for easy storage and finally settled on the easiest brace of all. Just a small piece of wood screwed into the bottom of the theater on each side. This also presents the least amount of opportunity for kids to trip over it.

Next I sewed some curtains out of this very stretchy, very thin, red fabric...such a pain. I don't have a tutorial on it because I was cursing it most of the time I was sewing it. Basically just sewed over the top to make a loop and then did a longer stitch on the bottom, sewing straight up and then pulling the thread to make it gather a bit.

To attach it to the theater I was going to use a wooden dowel and some hooks, but I had an extra shower tension rod, that my husband conveniently broke. For the curtain we used part of it, and just added the caps with a little electrical tape under one of the caps to make it tight.

Then under the shelf part of the stage, we attached these closet rod holders that we had in a bucket of misc. things. Then cut the rest of the rod with a hack saw (my hubbys job) to fit securely inside...

So that I could hang this little bag on the back of the stage to house the "performers" in between shows. I was planning on making a bag out of the same red fabric with little loops and buttons to hold it on-but after the curtains, I quickly abandoned that idea. I found this old pillow sham, sewed the shorter side over to make a loop and it was ready to go as a bag. Easy and free!

Lastly I had my hubby cut a piece of wood to fit along the bottom, screwed that to the base... then I quickly painted it with my handy dandy chalkboard paint and let the kids at it.

They are ecstatic to say the least, and have already come up with a few more uses for it than just a puppet stage. Bekah has been a princess at the top of a tower waiting for a knight to save her, and Christopher has been using it as his house, and will look out the window to see if his friends are ready to play. Of course, we've had many a puppet show, or more like puppet giggle shows as well.

I'm pretty excited about it too-we used mostly what we had on hand and only had to buy a couple extra cans of white spray paint and the fabric for the curtains.