DINING TABLE PLAYHOUSES

This page provides free instructions, designs and ideas for you and your kids to make your own Dining Table Playhouse. These are all designs and techniques created by Phil Ashburn back in 2008, which used to be sold by Phil in a now-closed ETSY site. Feel free to pick one that you like, and use the follow the instructions provided below on how to make it.

7 DESIGNS

#1, The Garden Home

#2, The Rocket Ship

#3, The Country Cottage

#3, Inside The Country Cottage or Garden Home

#4, The Pink Castle

#5. The Castle on a round table

#5, The Castle on a rectangular table

Inside the castles

#6, The Simple & Quick House

#7, The Cutie Pie

THE BASICS

The Basics. There's not a single sewing stitch in any of these designs. All connection points are held together with hot-melt-glue. There's three types of designs. One is spray painted designs with some permanent marker drawings. Another type of design is fabric pieces cut and glued on. The third type is simply painting the designs on with acrylic or fabric paint, using a brush, like you'd paint a canvas painting. You can actually use any of the seven design ideas to use any combination of these three methods of putting the designs on the fabric.

Just painting the fabric with a brush is the simplest, requires the least materials, gives the most freedom of expression, and is the easiest for a child to join in on the project. What better way to get your kids into art?

I think painting on fabric by brush is the most fun. The drawback is that, for the larger areas of solid color, it's faster and more solid of a color to use a big chunk of felt or fabric glued on, so each different method is a good option for different parts. My recommendation is to only use the designs, patterns and ideas shown here as a starting springboard, and just have fun creating as you go from there.

There's also the option of using stencils and stamps to quickly reproduce repeating shapes. Or use fabric transfer printer paper, that you just print artwork on and then iron it on. Or there's companies that will print your chosen artwork for you directly onto fabric transfers, that you then iron on. You could even zoom in on some of my patterns shown here, & have those printed.

And don't forget the option of painting things on the inside too! They're going to need a stove to cook on, a table to put the food out for guests, and a fireplace to tell stories around as the snow-storm rages outside. You'll note that this works better on a separate sheet than the main cloth, so the designs don't show on the other side. Just glue on the sheet later, or use Velcro so you (and your kids) can swap out the scenes occasionally.

For the fabric-pieces type, you can just cut the pieces of felt (or cloth) out of scrap material using scissors, but if you do, I recommend using good quality sharp scissors to make the cutting easier. Or, many of the felt piece shapes in these designs you can cut for free at a Ben Franklin craft store using their felt press machine & "cookie cutter"/stencil shapes. You just buy their felt sheets to use in their free-use machine onsite.

Dining Table Playhouses work particularly well on tables with legs instead of bases or pedestals, because bases & pedestals use up a lot of the play space under the table, while table legs leave a lot of room to play.

It's all this extra room under a dining table that can make these dining table playhouses a lot neater than the card-table type which have no room to even sneeze. But if there's not already a good rug under the table, you need to add a good cushy one (& maybe some thick blankets too) to make it truly neat in the fort, cause the bare wood floor makes it not nearly as neat and inviting.

These Table Forts all fit and grip onto the rim of the table, and don't go over the top of the table.

This allows you to make the fort in only one single piece to fit the height of the table without needing it to fit and be cut & made into the cubical or 3D shape of the table.

This design grips only the edge of the table, and goes around in one long rectangular piece, and then velcros back on the other end at the overlap point.

This also means you don't even need to clear off the top of the table to use it. And it folds up into the size of a folded bed sheet for easy storage.

My designs are in contrast to the typical table-cloth playhouse which go over the entire table top like this picture here. These table top type play houses make it a high likelihood that a flap of fabric is going to get stepped or sat on which is going to pull that table cloth off center and risk knocking the table top contents over or onto the floor. And these don't fit well at the corners and so seem more like you're in a table cloth than a cool special fort.

The fabric used in these designs shown is called Panne.

It's a velvety looking material that has the special quality of being able to stretch one way but not the other. This allows the part that goes over the rim of the table to be made so that it can stretch around the table without letting the edge slip off the table (you'll see). If you use regular fabric, like cloth, you'd need a different method for attaching it to the table, described later.