Making the tent
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| Sun, 01-14-2007 - 7:14pm |
Well DH claims Victor doesn't need a tent bed (drives me crazy sometimes) however he has agreed to let Vic go back to a twin size bed. This will help so he won't feel so swallowed in his queen sized bed right now. So, I drew up a pattern and decided that once we get him the twin bed again, I'm gonna make a tent for it myself. 4 triangles stitched together with it boxed in on all sides. Now the only things left to decide ( and I thought you ladies could help with that) are
1.) Do I stitch the center to a ring and attach it to the ceiling, or do I buy pvc pipe and make it an actual tent?
2.) If we decide to get the bunk beds ( like we're looking at) do I make the sides long enough to envelop both bunks or just the top? Or do I make a tent for the top and run a curtain across the bottom like a train car bed?
Yes, we are a creative family. My DH actually wants to build Victor the bunk beds but since he's got two bad habits of a.)never finishing what he starts and b.) not making anything portable (move alot in military) it's not a wise idea to let him make it.
So whatcha think ladies? Victor is very excited about this. He claims right now that he's "swimming" in his bed. He's gone so far as to borrow my body pillow so he now sleeps with Sammie the Salmon ( the fish body pillow at Wal-Mart) and Mom's velvet one. Sammie is an entirely different thing altogether. LOL.
Alexis

I think I'd make it attatch to the ceiling (more portable quicker to put up, less likelyhood of something hard falling in the night)-- but that might make it too high for him to get the cozy feeling of a tent. My middle son sleeps in the bottom of the bunk beds he shares w/ his older brother. He had curtains velcroed to 2 sides of his bed to make him closed in. He used them for a long time, then didn't. Now he's back to full swaddling (heavy blankets, being tucked in and pillows surrounding him) at night and having his curtains closed since he went back to school 2 weeks ago.
Betsy
We recently 'tented' our son's bed and we bought a canopy from Ikea. Then I had to attach a sheet to the sides of it. My son loves it, but I think I need to make a more permanent side to it than the sheet since ds isn't too keen on it, but I can't take down the canopy because ds freaks when it isn't there. I had to wash it due to dust and it wasn't done before he came home from school and was very upset about it not being there.
Back to your question, I would make it from the PVC, that way it's portable. You can take it with you in pieces. We tried a mosquito net type thing and it didn't work as it wasn't enveloping enough. It was attached to the roof and what ended up happening was ds would roll over in the night and it would somehow become wrapped around him which caused a totally different problem.
Whn my older boys were little we had bunkbeds and we put a tent around the bottom as my son was upset over the colours on the roof( we lived on a busy street and no matter what we did, you could see the brake lights and headlights go across the room). I put velcro up around the inside of the top bunk and made covers out of sheets, put the velcro on them and attached them. I made the door by attaching buttons on the sides and a catch on the bottom corners and he would attach them when he was playing. The upside of the velcro was that I could take them down for washing much easier.
Hopefully you will figure out what works best for you and your son. Hope some of my rambling helps LOL