Doll Crafting : Creating a Dance Studio w/Barre

This morning Zoey and I made a run to our local hardware store and picked up some foam core board, some wall hooks and a wooden dowel...to create a doll dance studio backdrop of course!  It turned out super cute and I had to share.  The lighting is really bad right now (the banner is actually pink in real life, not orange) but you can get the basic idea of what it looks like right now anyways.

I did a google search for ballet mini posters and found the images pictured above and printed them off for the studio's posters.

Of course the dolls need music for their class so we are using the record player that we printed and created yesterday.  They also have a little station for their bottles of water and healthy snacks.

Rebecca loves dance but it wears her out!! 

It's a good thing she has her good friend Emily to keep her company at dance class!

To create the above dance studio and barre you need the following: 2 large sheets of foam core board.  We chose 1 that was light blue and 1 that was white.  1 dowel, and 4 hooks (make sure that your dowel will fit inside the hooks that you get).  You will also need a strong adhesive.  We used glue dots and a hot glue gun.

First cut a length of your white foam core board (keeping it the same width as your blue board).  I made my cut at 8 1/2 inches high.

Next cut on your access of white foam board a strip (again keeping it the same width as your other pieces) measuring 1 1/2 inches from top to bottom.  Think of this as your molding for the wall.  :)

Adhere your white small strip to the top of your other cut white piece of foam core board.  (This is where you will later attach the bar).  Next, adhere the two white pieces of foam core board to the bottom of your blue piece.

You will notice now that where you adhered the smaller white strip of foam core to the other white foam core AND the blue foam core board it is now the right thickness for you to actually screw in your wall hooks!  Yay!  Go ahead and measure equal distances for your 4 wall hooks and screw those in.

Now for the fun part!  Add wallpaper (I added star paper to the bottom of our scene), add posters, ribbons, mirrors, banners, etc.  I also thought it might be fun to add another hook on the wall for dance bags, jackets, etc. but I didn't do it yet. Hopefully I'll get a better picture in the light tomorrow so you can see it with it's true colors.  

This was a fun project, something that I worked on while Zoey played with a friend today...the only thing is now I am thinking of all sorts of different scenes to create for Zoey's dolls!