Cardboard Box Puppet Theatre UpCycle Tutorial

Over Christmas Break, my husband was wanting a new pub table to go with his pool table in the basement (to counter-balance my ever growing sewing/crafting area!). So we picked something up and it came in a rather large box that my Squishy Kid could not resist! After careful thought, she decided she wanted a puppet theatre. So we began.

We took a small flat box that had held the chair legs and opened it up completely. Then we took a sharpie and drew all of the decorations she desired and started to adds colour!

We outlined a big rectangle that would eventually be the window.

Once the colouring was complete, Mommy took over and took a knife and trimmed all of the extras and cut out the "window" for the show! Because we used a flat panel, we needed to come up with a way to support it so it wouldn't fall over mid-show! I cut 6 pieces of cardboard about 6" tall and wide enough to span from the middle of the front panel to the edge of the outside panel when it is slightly closed. Hot glue held those pieces in place.

In order to get them to bend nicely to attach to the theatre on a wonky angle, I scored the cardboard so it would bend nicely:

Each of those pieces is scored a few inches from the edge. To score them, I took our utility knife and put the blade out about an eighth to a quarter of an inch. You can just see the tip peeking out in this picture:

I double checked to make sure it wasn't out far enough to go right through the whole piece of cardboard, then "cut" all the way across. Because corrugated cardboard has multiple layers, I didn't cut through all layers, but gave the cardboard a natural place to bend.

When attaching the supports to the theatre, I used hot glue and first ran a bead of glue along the inside of the scored bend - when dry, this will support that fragile hinge. Then I put glue on the ends (from the score to the edge) and lined them up on the frame. You can see where I put the supports here:

I placed them at the very top, very bottom, and right below the window. This seems to have provided the theatre with enough support to keep it from falling over.

Then it was onto the curtains. To make the curtains, measure the length and width of the opening. Mine was 20" wide by12" tall. To make proper window curtains, you generally want your width to be twice as long and height usually needs a few extra inches for a pocket for the curtain rod and nice hemmed edges. We went with 30" wide by 20" tall as we didn't need a nice looking ruffle when the curtains were closed.

To make the curtains:

1. Cut your fabric into 2 panels - so in our case, we had 2 pieces 20" tall by 15" wide.

2. Fold the sides in and hem flat (I usually give it about a half inch hem depending on the fabric type).

3. Fold the bottom up and hem it.

4. For the pocket at the top, you can either just fold the top down and hem once, or you can hem twice if you will see the top of the curtains to allow for a pretty ruffle. I just did one straight seam as the mounting for the curtain was behind the theatre, but you could put it out front as well.

5. Thread the curtains onto a piece of wooden dowel - we got a pack from dollar store - 10 dowels for $1!

I had to trim the dowels down a bit as one was not long enough but 2 was much too long! I will show you below how I made the joining of the dowels work. 

Once the curtains are made and threaded onto the rods, you will need to make some hinges. We were in the middle of an ice storm and didn't want to go to the hardware store. If I had been up for the drive, we would have just picked up some curtain brackets and hot glued them to the back to hold the dowels. BUT!! We live in the "snow belt" and got hit hard, so we stayed home and made our own! They are actually pretty cool!

I took a small piece of cardboard (about 1.5" by 4") and scored it in the middle on one side then flipped it over and cored about a half inch from the edge on each end. This creates a T when it is all folded on the scores:

I popped a hole with a sharp pencil into the T bracket and then glued it onto the back of the theatre just above the window. The middle bracket has 2 holes and the two outside brackets have one each.

Then I put the curtain rods into the outside brackets and actually glued them to the brackets so they weren't sliding around. Then I lined them up into the middle bracket and glued the outside brackets in place.

 Once they were all glued in place, we were done! :)

The Grand Reveal!!!

I have since been told that we need a ticket booth and a marquee to show what is playing!! We'll see what happens over the coming weeks - perhaps some snow days are in our future? :)

Good luck! Feel free to message me if you have any questions!! Such a fun project and very easy! :)

Oh, I almost forgot! Miss Alex got a Singer Sewing Machine for Christmas from Mommy and SHE did the curtains with some help! :) Super cute!!!

Stop telling my little girl she is so pretty!!

I have read several very powerful posts lately about telling little girls how pretty they are. I have struggled with this for a long time, as I have somehow produced one pretty little kid! With the curly orange hair and that sweet face, she is truly a showstopper! When she was a baby we would put a hat on her head before going grocery shopping so we wouldn't get stopped in every aisle by people who just wanted to complement her on her hair!

I will admit that I also catch myself more often than not telling her she is so beautiful - ALL THE TIME!!! Its hard not to! When my comments are about her appearance however, they are often in response to her wearing something less feminine/princessy - a Lightning McQueen t-shirt, or my favourite shirt of hers - a blue shirt with the cover of Charlotte's Web on it! My complements to her are more often inspired by something kind she has done or something sweet she has said or how she was able to problem solve in a given situation. AND, hearing that she is beautiful is not the only thing she hears from me in any given hour. She and I discuss our favourite books, why we have seasons, where rain comes from, what it would be like to live in space, and so many other really cool things that she comes up with! She hears regularly from my husband and I that she is smart, clever, creative...the list goes on!

I do get that when people see her at the grocery store they often jump at the opportunity to tell her how pretty she is. She hears that more in one day than she hears hello. It is shocking to say the least. I do want her to grow up feeling beautiful but being bombarded with comments on her looks right now, when she is 5, is not necessary. She knows she is a pretty girl, how? She gets told constantly! Does she think what you look like matters? YES!!! :( She talks about how she looks, says her hair looks, "ugly" today if she wakes up with bed head, she gets upset if her favourite dress is in the wash because wearing jeans is, "for boys!" despite everything my husband and I have taught her. She would dress in jeans and dinosaur t-shirts when she was a little girl. She had Buzz Lightyear running shoes and talked about being an astronaut when she grew up.

Since she became more aware of her surroundings, went to pre-school and now kindergarten, she is hearing from more people in a day how pretty she is, how cute her dresses are, how adorable her pretty clips in her hair are, how gorgeous she looks with a necklace on! Surprisingly, she is rarely asked what book she is reading, or what her favourite animal is! But she is often asked if she likes princesses and what movie or TV show does she like. We don't have cable at our house, and I'm not going to sit up on a pedestal and say that we NEVER watch TV or movies, but we try to ensure she is reading, creating, building, writing, imagining, exploring, asking questions.....we try to make sure she is doing all of these valuable things more than watching mindless stuff on TV. And when we do watch TV with her, if it is during the week, we limit TV watching to documentaries and educational programming.

I have seen a huge transformation in my daughter within the past 2 years. She has gone from wearing Star Wars and Dinosaurs to pink, frills and Hello Kitty. I have to bribe her to wear clothes that aren't filly and pink/purple and to get her to avoid princess stuff is a struggle!!

But I'm not surprised this is happening. We live in a society that puts a lot of pressure on women and teens, why would we expect marketing to be any different for little girls? Even Cinderella has had some work done to make her look MUCH younger than she ever was in the 90s and I think she has lost some weight too!

If the only attention we give little girls is when they are looking "pretty" and wearing frilly dresses and loving princess toys, we are setting them up to have body image issues for the rest of their lives. I would love it if someone would ask my daughter what her favourite dinosaur was, or what planet she liked the most. Please, if you have read this far, take this message away from this: when you see a little girl wearing a pretty pink dress, or looking extra cute, ask her about her favourite book, what her favourite sport is, or what she wants to be when she grows up. Ask yourself this question: what would you ask a little boy? And more importantly, why wouldn't you ask that same question of my little girl?

So I leave you with this last picture, of my pretty little girl digging into some BBQ Wings in her Star Wars t-shirt with daddy!

Sewing Space Organization Project

So this year my #1 resolution is to become more organized!! And by that I mean organized at all!! ;) If you have ever been in my house or my classroom, you know that I am a complete mess! My Squishy Kid Alex comes by it honestly!

So New Year's Day, I decided to attack my sewing room. It has been a complete mess for AGES!! I picked up some fancy coloured memory boxes from Michael's (they had them on 6 for $10!) and used them to sort my scraps and off-cuts of fabric by colour! So much easier!!

I put reds/pinks in the pink box, oranges/browns in the orange box and the rest of the colour boxes are self explanatory! The 3 white ones at the bottom will need labels this week. One has all black and white fabrics, one has All black/white background with prints/patterns in colour, and the last one is for charm packs, jelly rolls and other collections that should live together. They are now living on top of my Ikea shelves that have nice doors to cover up the mess!! :) I love how tidy my fabrics look now!! It has inspired me to perhaps start making a rainbow scrappy quilt! Stay tuned!

Here is a look at the inside of the boxes - next step will be to go back through and properly iron and fold all of the scraps and start to trim the scraps into usable pieces (i.e., little squares for a scrappy quilt, etc.).

Bigger fabric sets were placed into a bigger bin to keep them together.

I have to say, the project of organizing my fabric was awesome!! I got to look back through fabrics that I have picked up over the past 10 years or so and remember the projects they were purchased for. I was also reminded of some fabrics I have that just haven't used yet!! New project ideas are flooding my brain right now! Too bad I have to go back to school in 4 days!!! :( Hopefully I can get some projects completed this weekend before I head back!

My threads were another mess that needed to be attended to! My Nan, Ruth Smithers, passed away this summer which was an awful experience. My family got together to clean out her house and I have to say, my love of sewing and knitting definitely came from my Nan! My inability to organize and sort my materials also came from her!! :) We cleaned out her house and I inherited much of her sewing and knitting materials. Including an amazing little wooden shelf that my Grandpa (a carpenter) had made up for her to store her thread. I have put it up in my sewing room with all of my different threads and a few other things I inherited from Nan's sewing room.

The last major task was yarn. I love to knit and crochet in the car, on the couch, anywhere! I even have a knit/crochet club at school! You can check us out at APS Stitches. I often do not have a lot of excess yarn, but whenever I finish a project, I don't like to pitch the left-over yarn and some of my projects require 1/20th of a skein, leaving me with LOTS of extra! Some of what you see in the yarn shelf is actually projects that are in-progress! Perhaps one day I will find the time to complete some of those tasks! Who knows! In the top left I have a collection of some of my favourite sewing books, then 3 shelves of yarn, then the bottom right is actually a box full of music books and a box full of trumpet cleaning and maintenance supplies (I am a trumpet player as well!). The bottom right has a plastic shoebox with an in-progress sheep I started to knit on a trip to Montreal last winter! Hopefully I will get back to it again soon. The red thing is a set of wooden drawers. In the drawers are tiny little coloured seashells. They were snagged out of my Nan's attic as well! I remember as a little girl gluing those shells to cardboard making some pretty fantastic pictures! Maybe a fun project for my daughter one day. For now, they have been saved from the dump!

So, the grand reveal!! After a few solid hours of sorting, organizing, and reminiscing, I was able to confidently say, "my sewing room is organized!!!" and believe me, my husband was relieved!! :)

Here is what the final space looks like. Just to give some background, when we bought our current house (3+years ago), one of the positives was the big wide open basement. My husband (a plumber and jack of all trades) gutted the basement and then built from the studs. He added a spare bedroom, a beautiful bathroom, a pool table area and a main TV living area. There is space between my sewing space and the TV area for my daughter's toys and stuff as well!! So all 3 of us have a space downstairs to enjoy! So my space, the sewing area, is not huge by any means. But it serves its purpose and gives me a place to work and store all of my stuff!! :) This is what it looks like in the end! My next projects for the space will be looking into peg-board storage, and perhaps some art for the walls! :) We'll sees what happens!

Enjoy! :)

Welcome to Squishy Kid DIY!

Welcome to my first post! :) If you are reading this, THANK YOU!! I have been wanting to start this blog for years and actually created this site months (maybe even over a year?) ago! Baby steps!

It is my hope to use this blog to share and document learning experiences, milestones and other significant parts of my life that might be of interest to others.

Some things I am passionate about:
- family
- sewing
- quilting
- knitting
- crochetting
- general crafting
- teaching (I'm a public school grade 2 teacher!)
- reading
- unionism (I am a proud ETFO member!)
- pets (we have 3 dogs and a kitten!)
- technology (iPad apps, etc.)
- tattoos and body art

I will do my best to post about one of these topics every week, if not more often to keep things rolling. This week I hit up the "organization" sales and was able to revamp my sewing room! Check back later this week to see how that worked out! :)