I'm excited to finally reveal the card table tent, also known as the super secret project that my mom and I have been working on! But first, let's back up. Waaaay up. All the way to March. That's when my sister-in-law, Bren's mom, emailed me a link to this super cute idea. It was one of those afternoons where it was clear neither of us felt like being at work, as we kept sending fun links back and forth to each other. With this particular link she wrote, "This is so cute! I'd never get around to making one but Aunt Lucy might!"
Y'all, it's like she was daring me to do it. Game on.
That was March. At the time I thought, "Brennie's birthday isn't until August. This will be a fun project for me to tackle over the summer." And then the summer got busy with things like trips to the beach, weddings, and that really big surprise party we threw. Before I knew it, it was the last week of July and I was just a couple weeks out from Bren's birthday.
I did some googling to refresh my myself on the project and ended up finding this handy tutorial. At just thirteen bucks, I ordered the pattern without hesitation. Sure couldn't hurt to have the dimensions listed out for me, right?
Here's the picture from the pattern that I would be recreating for my favorite 3-year-old little girl.
Cute, isn't it? The idea is to make a fabric playhouse that fits right over the top of a standard card table. Then it can be folded up and put away easily. Genius!
Originally, I thought I'd try to tackle this sewing project by myself. I knew my mom would be super impressed with me if I could pull it off. But then the pattern came in and I started reading through it and there were a lot of words in there I didn't know. Plus, time was running out.
I sprung the idea on my mom the weekend I stayed at her house. I had a feeling she'd think it was cute but I didn't realize how excited she'd be about it. We headed to JoAnn's first thing that Saturday morning and ended up spending over three hours there! We decided to go with a pink and green color scheme so that it'd match Bren's room, and in addition to being the right shades of those colors, we also wanted them to be cheap. We spent a lot of time pulling bolts of fabric and then putting them back before we were finally ready to stand in the ridiculously long line to get them cut.
Later that night, my parents had a wedding to attend so, since I was left to entertain myself, I went ahead and got started cutting out all the pieces. The nice thing about having the pattern is that it had all the detail pieces drawn to scale so I could just trace them onto a piece of Wonder Under and then iron it to my fabric. No guesswork - my kind of project.
Now, some of you that have been reading along for a while may be a little confused about the hint I gave. How do a tree, door, and mailbox fit into this project? Well, I never said they were a real tree, door, and mailbox. I'm sneaky like that.
See? Here's the tree laid out on the kitchen table after I'd cut out all the individual pieces.
I have to say, I had the easy job for this project. I did all the tracing and cutting out while my mom did all the sewing. She even took it one step further than the pattern and lined it so you wouldn't see all the seams on the inside.
I didn't do a very good job of photographing all the steps, but here's a shot of one side laid out on the table.
The whole tent is made out of fabric except for those flowers. We did those out of felt so that we could just sew them down in the middle for a 3-D effect without having to worry about the edges fraying.
We barely got the tent finished in time for the birthday party. In fact, we were tacking on the curtains just a couple hours before the party started. Here's where I goofed again. I should've taken some good pictures of it at my mom's house. Since I didn't do that, all my pictures were taken while dodging the birthday girl and her friends as they crawled in and out of it. I apologize in advance for the poor quality of the pictures - it's super cute in real life!
The tree wraps around a corner, in between two windows complete with shutters and curtains.
Close up of window.
The opposite side has the two bushes with felt flowers.
The address for Bren's playhouse is her birthday: August 18.
To the left of her front door is a light.
And to the right is this really cute mailbox.
It even has a pocket so she can receive mail! I had every intention of putting her birthday cards in the mailbox, but then I forgot. Bad, Aunt Lucy.
You can see in this picture of the front that my mom lined the hole for the door in white to make it look like a door frame. (You can also see the doorbell in this picture.)
I waited til the tent cleared out before sticking my head in to get a picture of the inside. The inside is lined in white even though it looks pink from the sun shining through in this picture. The curtains are one of my favorite parts of the playhouse. They're a super cute polka dot on the outside and then lined with this cute green fabric on the inside. They're tied together with a piece of pink ribbon and then tacked down to the window frame so they don't move.
I'm not 100% sure, but I think the birthday girl liked it. Here she is sticking her head out to tell us to come in and play.
Later on in the afternoon, I caught her 6-year-old cheetoh-eating brother hanging out in the tent. Busted!
So there you have it - our first attempt at the card table tent. There's a good chance you'll get to see our second attempt at it very soon. It was a fun project to work on and I hope Bren has fun playing in it!
More pictures from Bren's birthday party coming soon!