How to make doll house dining room furniture from recyclables

Here's how we made dining room furniture for the girls' dollhouse this morning.

Start with an empty paper towel tube. Take the largest doll (usually the "father" doll) and put him in a seated position.

Cut the paper towel tube to the desired height of the chair.


Using the doll's height as a guide, cut out a seat. Save the piece of cardboard that was cut away from the tube. We'll be using it later.


Test it with the doll. It should be stable. (We're aiming for toys, not artwork. We want them to be durable enough to last when the children play with them.)

Repeat until enough chairs are made.

Test the chairs with different sized dolls.

A half-gallon container makes a great template for a dining room table.

Rinse the container, so it is clean of any food residue.





Dishes can be made by punching circles from cardstock. (Or, could just draw circles and cut them out.)



We have a punch that makes silverware, too. We punched them from gray cardstock. (The punch was used to make the insert cards for Jonathan's bar mitzvah invitation a few years ago.)





Here is Emily, sorting the "silverware" and "plates". We used the plastic tray from a manicotti box to keep them separate.

For each chair, crumple a piece of paper. (The pink paper in this photo was a misprint of a
school fund raiser flier.)



Stuff the paper into the seat of the cardboard tube. This will make the chair much more sturdy.

Place a cotton ball on top of the crumpled paper. The cotton ball should be just above the height of the seat.




Remove the crumpled paper and cotton from the tube. Place a piece of duct tape over them, centering it on the cotton ball.

Place a second piece of duct tape, oriented 90 degrees away from the first, also centered on the cotton ball. Your seat is now upholstered in duct tape.

Later,we'll re-insert the seats in the cardboard tubes. This is the idea:





Paint the empty tube-seats. Let them dry.



Reinsert the duct-tape-upholstered seats in the dried, painted cardboard tubes.



From the cut-away piece of cardboard (that I mentioned earlier), trace the shape of the tube's circular opening. Cut this circle out.

Glue the cardboard circle to the bottom of the chair, Push tightly to secure.




Test it with the doll to make sure it is solid and sturdy.





The girls enjoyed making food from clay. Those yellow braids in the lower right hand corner are the challot Emily made. Gretta is making 'many many many cakes'.




Cover the half gallon container frame with Popsicle/craft sticks.

{OOOOPS! Missing the picture of the template from the oj container. I plan to update it late Saturday night EST. Sorry!}

Add trusses (triangular supports) to the bottom to make it very staple. Here is the table holding a brick (5lbs):





Snip sections of a drinking straw to make doll-sized drinking glasses. Single pony beads make great cups, too.



For a wine bottle, use a taller bead, with a tiny bead glued to it as a cork. A silver cylindrical
bead makes a great kiddush cup.

Emily's challot are under the play-dough challah cover she made. (The word "shabbat" was written in play-dough snakes.)

Bon Appetit!