Monday, June 17, 2013

A Tie-Dyed Teepee for Two

We have friends from church, the Little's, that have been trying to eliminate a bamboo forest (literally), that the previous home owner planted in their newly purchased home.  So what to do with all this bamboo?! Why build a teepee of course!  The Little's not only had enough cut-down bamboo to build their own teepee, but enough for the boy scouts, as well as us Olsen's...and various other families too!  And we even grabbed enough bamboo to make two teepees!  Oh it's going to be a regular club house convention in our back yard!

I found a great website with all the "how to" for the teepee building materials and steps (http://www.etsy.com/blog/en/2011/how-tuesday-backyard-teepee/), so we just needed to get rolling on the material collection.  We started getting everything together about a month ago, but just hadn't started on it yet due to various activities taking precedence.  Finally this past Friday and Saturday, I decided we were just going to take the time to get it done.  PLUS, my mom, "Nana Barbie", just got into town on Thursday for a quick visit, so we had her craftiness at our disposal as well! 

We whipped out the canvas and decided it needed a cute face lift before we strung it up on our bamboo poles.  How to make this teepee fun and artsy, knowing it will be out in the Virginia summer elements?  Tie-dye!  Then if it rains and the dye bleeds a little, it'll just add to the character of the teepee!  (*Though it has sprinkled since finishing this project on Saturday, and no bleeding has occurred, so I guess we'll see if it happens.*) So we rubber banded the canvas, used the dye squirt bottles (the girls LOVED this part), sprayed away, and began to watch the dye dry.


I began cleaning up when I realized, I should've been much MUCH more careful with this dye.  What was my first indicator?  Well...the girls.  They looked like flower-power children...and nothing was coming off.  Of course I've tie-dyed before, and of course we wore gloves then!  How did I make such a grave oversight?!  I'm going to blame it on my desire to get this teepee built, that impaired my judgment.  Ugh.  Lauren and Olivia were a mess! :(

Notice the blue spray dots.  Apparently Lauren was squirting herself in the face too!




After about 10 mins of soaking.  Still pretty much all there!
 
Regardless of her state of appearance, Olivia still managed to get Nana Barbie to pick her up and snuggle her.


 
So how did our tie-dying turn out (besides on our skin?!)  Well I think we did a pretty great job...and even the red checkered gingham I had to add to cover our over sized teepee completely seems to fit!  I'd say our teepee's style is hippy meets country girl.  A fun combination in my books!  And to make it even better, the teepee even fits Nate standing up!  And can comfortable fit about a dozen toddlers - woohoo! 
Pocahontas and her new hangout.
Closer view of the tie-dye and wooden stick closure.


A view of the first club house meeting, complete with chairs and members!
Another inside-teepee view of our sweet tie-dying skills
Also, the completed construction of our teepee has seem to raise the Olsen girls' "fun" status with our neighbor kids (They are like 6 and 9, so they really don't interact with our 2 1/2 and 1 1/2 year olds much-understandably).  Guess we can now do some practice camping in our back yard teepee to see if we are "there yet", in being able to actually take the girls camping.

1 comment:

  1. What a blast! That is one funky teepee - going to have to figure this out. GOOD JOB!!!

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