Princess And The Pea Playset

Good Morning! Today I am going to show you the project I made for Princess's Christmas Eve present. Everyone knows I love a good fairy tale. I am a sucker for the magic and romance. Princesses, castles, mythical animals....One of my favorite fairy tales is the story of the Princess and The Pea. And for any of you not familiar with the tale, I will give you a quick summary. One stormy night, a young maiden knocked on the door to a castle belonging to a Prince and his mother, the Queen. The maiden insisted she was a Princess, but the Queen was not convinced and decided to put her to the test. She told the servants to make a bed of several mattresses (I can't remember the exact number, but a ridiculous amount) both firm and soft and to place one single pea underneath all of them and she warned the servants not to say a word about the pea. She said that if the maiden didn't notice the pea, then she was not a princess. But if she truly was a princess, it would be noticed. Sure enough, the next morning, the Princess complained of being black and blue and having had a terrible night's sleep. She had felt the pea beneath all those mattresses. The Queen then believed the Princess and the Prince and Princess were married.
There is this crazy expensive, yet freakishly adorable Princess and The Pea Playset that I have always wanted to get for Princess. But I could never justify buying her something like that when it would probably get broken anyway. So luckily, I found the inspiration for making my own play set from yet another Craftgawker.com find. You can see the original instructions here. This is how mine turned out.

 I made the base of the bed from Popsicle sticks (and lots of hot glue) and then the rest was made of sticks.

My poor daughter is so story deprived. I have never even read her this story! That's soon to change though.

 Princess loves the "pillows" the most and insists that the Princess is Sleeping Beauty.

I love how the little doll turned out. She was made in such a hurried frenzy, that I'm surprised how well she looks. (I would like to make more dolls like this, so look out for future fairytale playsets) The one problem with her is that I had a really hard time getting her hair to stay on. Hot glue just made her hair look funny and regular glue wouldn't stay. So consequently she has a ton of hair under there that's just kind of shoved under her hood. Princess brings the doll to me every now and then to "fix" it when the hair starts falling out....

 I used a green bead I had on hand for the pea.

I wanted my bed to look a little more "woodland" inspired than the original Popsicle stick one. So once again I went outside and ripped branches off of a giant tree in our yard to make supplies for it.

The mattresses were the easiest part by far. I just sewed together squares of fabric in several different fabrics and then stuffed (actually I had my brothers and brother in law helped with the stuffing....it was Christmas Eve day! Talk about last minute right? I told you I was busy!) them with fluff then sewed them closed with the sewing machine.

Now that's a real Princess!