Tangled Tower

So as is the nature of being 3 year’s old, each month involves making mummy and daddy watch a new Disney movie over and over and over again.

For the last couple of months Sofia’s favourite has been Tangled – the Disney retelling of the Rapunzel story.

Luckily for us, this is a great film with good music, amazing graphics and humour that survives being re-watching.

So when we were in Disneyland Paris a couple of months ago, Sofia got the obligatory plastic characters to add to her collection alongside Peter Pan.

Forward a month or so and as Spring sprung in the garden, it became obvious that one of the birch trees transplanted last year had died.

This coincided with a work colleague giving me all his oak offcuts from his new flooring, and then I had an idea.

Using said offcuts, some ash and lime wood I had lying around the workshop, and some spare slats from an Ikea wooden blind I decided to make a Rapunzel tower for Sofia’s toys in the garden.

The first stage was to grab a still image from the movie to get my design ideas, then from this I simplified it considerably (time is not something I have a lot of these days!).

I glued the Ash and lime together and turned this on the lathe to make the roof.

Then using the oak, I made the walls, floors and lower wall.

Sofia helped me with some of the more dangerous cutting and messy gluing!

This then left the detailing which I did using the Ikea blind – I’ve used this before, mostly as shims, and have no idea what wood this is – but it comes in handy.

Finally all that remained to do was stain the finished tower, cut down the tree and mount the whole thing.

As you can see, Sofia was delighted with the end result

Now off to the garden centre to choose a new tree!