Creating Littlest Pet Shop Furniture by Sierra (7 yrs)

Sierra has been head over heels in love with Littlest Pet Shops for over 2 years now. She loves to play with them, dress them up and take their pictures and videos.

Her last birthday was a Littlest Pet Shop theme with lots of pet shop fun.

Over the past couple of days she has been crafting furniture for her pets. She started out by wanting to make a bed out of an empty Smarties box. She covered the box with pink felt and glued it on with the hot glue gun.

Next she rolled up some blue felt to be the pillow.

She wanted to sew on some beads to add a hanging decorative fringe to her pillow and did an awesome job of sewing. This is her really first attempt at sewing. She did make these heart window hangers earlier in the day (inspiration for these hearts HERE) where she had to string beads onto a ribbon heart, but not real sewing per say. I think this activity might have given her confidence to want to try to sew.

  Sierra chose white and gold beads to sew on for the trim.

She decided to glue the pillow onto her bed as after all her hard work sewing she did not want to loose or damage her pillow.

Here is her bed all finished with her kitty tucked in nicely. She already had the quilt in the picture from something else.

Kitty is happy to have a new bed

Pet shops all set up in their home

Later that day she decided she would prefer to have a bunk bed, so we went to the store for another box of Smarties and started the process all over again. We then used Popsicle sticks to join the beds together and to make a ladder. I think it turned out pretty good!

Today she wanted to make a bigger couch. She has a Calico Critter couch but it is fairly small and she wanted a couch for three pets to sit on together. She had plans to make a couch and two chairs but the couch was quite difficult and required a fair amount of help so she stopped with just the couch for today.

First she cut out rectangle shapes from cardboard. This was a bit hard for her as the cardboard was thick and she had to cut out three of each piece so they could be glued together for durability. There was a large rectangle for the back of the couch, a slightly smaller rectangle for the seat of the couch, and the side arms were made from even smaller rectangles. Three pieces of each was a lot of hard work for her to cut out all on her own... but she did it.

She then had to glue each set of three pieces together. She used a glue stick for this and then pressed the pieces together firmly for a short bit.

Next she picked out some fabric from my stash of material. She laid the cardboard piece down onto the backside of the material and cut it out leaving room to secure it to the cardboard.

After the edges were glued down she glued on a piece of felt to the back of the couch to finish it off. The picture below shows the seat of the couch left unfinished as it is on the bottom.

The side arms were too difficult for her to do by herself. She couldn't use the felt to cover the back of the arms as the back would become the sides of the couch and would be seen. I helped her with the arms and then with gluing it all together. We glued on a pony bead to each corner to lift the couch up off the ground too.

Then it was ready for company...

I love seeing her take an idea she has in her mind and creating it! It is one of the best things about unschooling...having the ability to follow your children's lead and helping them accomplish those ideas is very rewarding for us all.

In the past Sierra made this doll house from a cardboard box (inspiration for this house came from HERE).

Aayla made one too...

 And she made this car and bus in the picture below from match boxes. The car was made by doubling up two match boxes.

Now we are on the hunt for a glass door bookshelf similar to the one pictured below so we can make a large pet shop house ourselves. This one is beautiful but wayyyy out of our price range and plus making it will be half the fun.

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