Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Recycled Teepee

When a friend of mine pointed me towards this tutorial on A Beautiful Mess about how to make your own teepee - I jumped at the opportunity to whip one up. I was amazed how quickly this project came together - but also the size of it - it is much bigger than I had thought it would be!


Before we moved into our house the previous owners had lived here for 45 years. I don't know if they had the same curtains for that period of time - but we took every curtain down. I washed kept some white 'cotton' eyelet curtains for a potential craft project. This material has now been sitting in a box for 3 years - hurrah - a purpose and confirmation of my belief that one should never throw material away.


I had to amend the tutorial slightly (my teepee is slightly narrower by 2" at the base) as I had a limited amount of material to work with.

Some of the material was damaged - but I just had to embrace the frays and nicks in some places.


I constructed the front panel differently from the tutorial. The front panel is a triangle at the top and then two gentle ruffled curtains with more abundant ruffles at the base of each curtain. I had some fabric scraps left over from the project and not enough length in the curtains so I sewed all the left overs scraps together and ruffled them - I think the ruffles hide all the seams well.


I carefully trimmed and saved some of the scalloped edges to make the curtain tie backs.


Inside the teepee I sewed 3 ties to each seam. One at the top, in the middle and at the bottom. I used ribbon that was left over from our Princess Tea Party - but I think you could use anything that can be tied tightly without ripping.

Instead of using 2x1 lengths of wood - I opted for a pricier round 1 3/8" wood molding poles (8ft lengths). Personally I think they were worth the extra cost.


The teepee will be mostly used outside but I did put felt pads on the bottom of each pole. Despite sanding the base of each pole before hand - I was worried that the poles would scratch or mark the floors when we played with it inside.

I made a mat for the tee pee out of an old wool blanket I purchased on ebay for $18.26 (that price includes the shipping.) Ebay is an excellent source for finding recyclable materials. Once I had reminded myself of the basic geometry of a perfect triangle I began cutting and constructing my hexagon blanket. I even reused the binding of the original blanket on the edges. I might decorate this blanket in a cute way at a later date.


I hope this will inspire you with your own tee pee! The Land of Nod & Magic Cabin have lovely teepee's for sale. And if you would like to make a smaller scale teepee here is the cutest little teepee on LoLovie her teepee is made from a tutorial on Pink Toes and Power Tools.

3 comments:

Sue said...

I gave my nephew a teepee when he was about 4. He, his baby sister and the dog all loved it. When the kids weren't playing in it, the dog slept there.

driftwood said...

quite brilliant!

Shellie Wilson said...

Oh I think this would make a wonderful Mommy retreat.Surely a cup of coffee would taste so much better in there.