Thursday, December 22, 2011

Last Christmas present, done! (Now to wrap)

I'm finally done with my last Christmas gift.  This one is for my 4 year old niece, Bailey.  I love my nephews but since marrying Zach I can finally buy (make) girly stuff!!!  I was inspired to make this from a recycled pringles can post, which I thought I favorited, but can't find now. Its really almost nothing like the original tutorial, so whatevs.  Here goes:

This is the final product. A 3 tier, rotating tree house/treasure trove/etc tower.
 There is a dowel going through the edge of each of the layers, so you can rotate each section out and "open" it.
 One layer is a bedroom for froggy, complete with hand-sewn mattress and pillow. I've been doing a lot of sewing lately.
 Top level holds stickers right now. I'll let Bailey add whatever she wants.
 Middle layer is currently for jewelry and a tiny panda I found. I'm sure Bailey has lots of her own little treasures to store in this thing, so I didn't really want to fill it up with stuff.
So here's the tutorial part. (Sorry no pictures.)  1) Go to Michaels and find the section where the unpainted wood and paper boxes are. Here I bought these 3 little cylinder boxes for 1.99 each. (They are like 4"x3"? Around that size.  Buy a dowel if you don't have  one at home (I did.)  I took 2 of the 3 lids that came with these guys and glued them together to form the slightly large base. I filled these with rice and glue to make it heavy enough to deal with 4 year old play. I remembered to leave a hold for the dowel and glued that in as well.  When that was dry and sturdy, I covered it with paper and mod podge.  Then I decorated each box as I liked.  My paint colors (and paper) weren't too hot until I decided to cover each box with mod podge as well...then the purple layer just POPPED and I love it!  I also tried to decorate with puffy paint before painting the colors on (middle layer) for texture...but I'm a bad puffy painter. Oh well -- if I could puff-paint columns and such, I would have, and they would have been awesome. Okay so next I cut a layer of stiffened felt and put it in the base of each circle/cylinder box thingy.  I also cut the hole for the dowel. I also cut my dowel kind of tall so the top level wouldn't bounce around so I had to cut a hold in the top lid as well.  The dowel sticking out was kind of ugly so I added a flag.  Overall this project was really fun and if I would love something like this as my own jewelry stand!!!

The pringles re-make list had you 1) slicing the can into sections and adding your own bottom to each section, 2) using a dowel in the base and then gluing a straw to the outside of each section and stacking each piece by running the straw through the dowel.  I thought my method was more sturdy.

Likey? Think Bailey will like? Wish you had your own (maybe with a better color scheme?! haha)

1 comment:

jess said...

Oh nice. Niiiice. First you make us all look bad remembering people's birthdays and now you're a shoo-in for all time champion in the favorite auntie category?!?! You're gonna get yourself kicked out of this family for high standards, missy. Don't worry though, by the end of the day tomorrow you'll be so sick of kids that you'll change your mind about going to RI for the holidays. Mwah ha ha ha hah....

p.s. We got B a Christmas book. Didn't realize til we got it home that it's about the night before and how you should go to sleep so Santa will come. Which of course will have already happened by the time she reads it. Fail.