Make A DIY Dolls' House, Shadowbox Or Toy Theatre When Travelling

 Stuck indoors overseas on a rainy day? Make a DIY dolls' house or theatre. For your children who are with you or your host's children. Or to send a video to amuse the children or grandchildren back home. Or just for yourself. Or to create a group of local people who like crafts.

Dolls' House

For the dolls' house you can start with the shell of the house from a shoe box and lid. Use a packing box if you have moved house. An alternative is a paper or fabric tote bag.

You can add a roof top, or attic, and two side wings made from cereal boxes, whole or cut diagonally. 

Windows 

Make windows from window envelopes.  Or transparent plastic bags. Or shower caps.

Pelmets

Make a pelmet by printing a pattern such as a border, or use a scrap of wrapping paper from gifts, or the edges of a white or gold paper doiley..

Curtains

Make net curtains from an old or new flannel, or paper tissue (Kleenex). Cut white paper for nets, such as half height cafe curtains. 

Carpets, Bedding & Soft Furnishing

Dolls

Little people and dogs can be cut from newspapers, magazines or advertising leaflets. You can lean them or paste them against the walls. For example, by the front door greeting arrivals, back view waiting to be let in.  Add morer looking sideways out of the windows. 

To make them freestanding, glue or sellotape paper or card, or cut the neat fold of a Xmas card, or birthday card or postcard or address card (your own spares, or a shop whose address you already added to your phone so you no longer need the card. 

Furniture

In the hotel or restaurant bar look for

Paper parasols.

Corks - for tables, stools, and doll bodies.

Champagne corks for tables, table lamps, or cyclinder dolls with heads. 

Sandwich markers stuck into corks make flags outside the front door or entrance.

Useful Discarded Items

White doileys make carpets, table cloths, pelmets, bedding. 

From Xmas or party crackers, the concertina paper hats make roof tiles, pelmets, drapes or duvets.

Match boxxes or small boxes with bathroom shower caps make suitcases, boxes, beds, cots, small cars  or boats or trains. 

Used coffee capsules make flower pots. If you can trust yourself and your children not to spill things, take off the foil top and you have realistic soil.

Toy Theatre

A large cardboard box can make a table- top theatre, like the ones you used to see at the sea-side for Punch and Judy. 

Chopsticks can be used to suspend marionettes.

Magazines and adversing leaflets can be cut up to show stick figues, shadow puppets, and plates of food. 

Toilet roll cardboard cylinders an be made into columns, the bodies of stuck figures, or to conceal pop-up puppets.

Old gloves or children's bath gloves can be cut and painted or embroidered to make five, finger-puppet figures.

Simple Shadow People

If you are in a restaurant or bedroom and don't have time but need to entertain children, or adults, consider making shadows on walls. You can have yourself or the most extravert prson as the entertainer. Or go round in a circle asking each person to give a one person hand character a description, name, action or line of continued conversation.  

Like Paddington Bear, your imaginary characters or monsters can travel to or from your current destination and home town.  A vertical hand makes a door or wall or barrier or border. A horizontal hand can make the road or the sea or raincloud. A bunched hand makes the rising or setting sun. 

Thumb People

Two hands with thumbs raised make two characters talking. No time for shadows? Just create two thumb characters to entertain a child. Or you have a thumb as the adult, and the child raises their thumb as the responding child.

Silhouette Shadow Puppet - Shadowgraphy

You can also use your hands to make shadow puppets on a plain colour wall. Have two contrasting figures made by different people as actors, talking to each other, The simplest is just to use your thumb as the lower jaw, and the rest of your fingers as the rest of the head.

Your hand can make wave movements to suggest a plane taking off, then conntinuing, then landing. 

Or a sailing boat on heavy seas.

 Once when we were the last in a restaurant with children after a birthday party, we asked the owner to dim the lights so that we could demonstrate a rabbit shadow. The restaurant owner and two of the waiters were delighted and showed us their own versions of shadow animals talking in other languages and singing.

Whether you wish to spend hours creating a box of ingenius items, with an elaborate song, or improvisation, or just to turn off the lights and make a shadow game after dinner for a few moments you have lots of opportunity to make use of and enjoy every minute or your holiday time.

Useful Websites

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadowgraphy_(performing_art)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Hand_games

See earlier post on March 3rd.

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