Quimper Hittys

We wanted to make a bed out of cardboard for Hitty, using materials and equipment that are already at hand, and not needing fancy equipment or materials. We used medium weight corrugated cardboard, a craft knife, and glue, four empty cotton reels, and some 1/4 inch wide ribbon. We used three kinds of glue: wood glue, hot melt glue and gluestick. You could get away with using just wood glue but some steps will take longer to dry!

Pizza boxes are a good weight but other medium weight cardboard can be used of course…

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Our whole doll bed could be made out of the top of the pizza box.

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The base here is a 4 X 7 inch rectangle. You can change the length to 8 inches if your Hitty would like a slightly longer bed.  The foot board is a half moon the same width as the base (4 inches).  The headboard is the same shape as the foot board but a bit taller.

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Cut three identical pieces for each element of the bed, making sure at least one of each set is oriented at 90 degrees crosswise from the others. This will make the final elements strong and less apt to warp.

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On the head board, cut a quarter inch strip off the bottom of two of the shapes, so you end up with two shorter pieces and one longer piece.  Do the same for the foot board.

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Here are three foot-board pieces…the back one is a quarter-inch longer than the other two, and this longer one will be placed on the outside of the bed when you glue it all together.  Place this longer one flat on your work surface and make a stack with the cross-channel one in the middle, and the other one on top. If you are you are using printed cardboard, try to make sure the outside surfaces are plain brown cardboard, putting the printing on the inside.

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Glue the layers together with white glue or wood glue, making sure you leave the longer one with the extension sticking out the bottom on both the head and foot boards creating a notch.

The rectangular pieces for the base are glued together in a stack, again with the cross-wise piece in the middle layer and the printed sides in.

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Press the pieces together until they are dry! Then trim with craft knife until all three pieces in each stack are exactly the same size, except for the extensions on the head and footboards.

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Next attach the headboard, base, and footboard elements together with hot melt glue…

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The 1/4 inch extensions on the head and footboards will go on the outside edge of the base, with the base slotting into the little notch you have created.  Smear glue on all the contact edges so you get a nice strong bond, and hold in place a few moments for the hot glue to cool and set.

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For legs, you can use anything that you have four identical pieces of – we used cotton reels and glued them in place with hot melt glue.  But you could use corks; dowels or clothespegs sawn to the size you like, a stack of buttons, lego, bottle caps, film canisters, or you could laminate cardboard together. Just make sure that all four legs are the same length…trim, sand, or otherwise flatten if necessary.

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We covered the raw edges of the cardboard with 1/4 inch grosgrain ribbon to neaten it…

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…over the endboards too. We liked the texture of the grosgrain ribbon, but any flat ribbon can be used, or if you don’t have ribbon you can use a strip of paper. Trim and neaten the blobs of glue, the threads of ribbon and any fluffy bits of cardboard.

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All done but the decorating!

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It was a freezing cold day outside when we went to paint the bed, so the spray paint went on very globby and also every bit of excess hot melt glue showed up! Ugh.  We had a bit of tidying up to do with scissors and craft knife. Probably better to do the trimming and tidying before you paint!

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It looked much better after tidying the bits up, and giving the whole bed a top coat of acrylic paint.

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A few shapes were cut out of paper and glued on with glue stick…

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…and overpainted with black to match the rest of the bed…

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…and trimmed with gold.  You could decorate by sticking on a decal, or a pretty button or anything you like that is fairly flat, but you could go wild too – maybe glue on shells, photographs, silhouettes, decoupage…

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The bed frame is done, now you just need a mattress, sheets, pillows, a quilt…click this link for instructions on the way I like to make dolly mattresses!