The little playhouse

I’ve been wanting to post a step by step for the playhouse we built for Megan’s booth at Silver Bella. Our good friend, Joe Anderson, Drama Instructor at Blair High School, designed it and Matt and Dan built it.

Joe Anderson designed the playhouse

Sheets of Styrofoam were cut and spread with glue, and layer of muslin and more glue.

The secret to cutting styrofoam is a red hot knife.

After both sides of muslin and glue dried, we trimmed one side close....

....and folded the other side over and glued it again.

Both sides of all the pieces were then painted with latex paint.

There is alot of glueing and drying and painting and drying in this project. The glue dry time was several days, but the paint dried in a day. I used White paint for this project and was lucky enough to find a white shade in the Scratch and Dent Paint Shelf at Lowe’s. A regular gallon of paint cost about $25, but this mis-tint was only $5 for a gallon!

The back is a full sheet of styrofoam, and the side and top are about half sheets.

The pieces were held together with simple skewers!

Painting the house was done with black latex paint and a sponge brush and pink spray paint. We were going for almost a cartoon-like appearance of the little playhouse. The inside was kept white.

The pink stripes and blue trim were spray paint.

The interior is black latex paint and was painted free-hand by Megan.

We made a real windowsill for the window and attached it with skewers, but we needed something a little stronger to hold it up. Megan’s flowers are HeAvY!!!

The windowsill held paper mache flowerpots with Megan

We opted for smaller tables scattered through the 10 X 10 booth instead of banquet tables supplied by the hotel. I brought 2 white round tables and 4 black square tables that were bought for the wedding. We also used an old black desk I have at home, and that’s where our customers checked out. Megan had her business cards in a section of the desk for papers, etc.

Old lamp I spray painted black and made the shade to match the outside of the house.

The Styrofoam pieces were bulky, but very lightweight. Dave actually put the house together almost alone when we were setting up. It helped that we had a dress rehearsal in the garage before.

Setting up the house took no time at all.

For the bags, we re-used Megan’s wedding runner! I spray painted the runner with pink polka dots for the wedding, so they were already on. I just cut them and sewed up the sides with a curvey fun stitch and pink thread. I didn’t even turn them, I left the edges to the outside.

I sewed the bags and just cut out holes for the handles.

I found this spinner rack at a store this past summer at the lake for 10 bucks.

Felt packets were displayed on 3-tired metal racks we got at Target last Easter. They were bright green and we just shot them with some flat black spray paint.

Megan made all the packaging for her products.

Wrist corsages were in little candy boxes with pom pom stuffing.

The pins were displayed on a dressform and looked like butterflies.

Paper Mache flowerpots filled with Oasis and Pom Poms held the button flowers.

Natasha's HandKnit Mittens were displayed on a black Mitten Tree with an antique clothespin.

There was plenty of room to walk around.

Cute Shop. Cute Kids.