Princess and the Pea Craft: Activities During Corona

This is a repost of an activity that I shared in 2009. It has been a popular link ever since.




After digging through my files, I rediscovered this craft that I regularly used for Bedtime themed storytimes when I was working as a children's librarian. This was always a favorite with kids and parents, especially after hearing the tale by Hans Christian Andersen. With summer here and so many children out of school, I thought I'd clean it up a little and create a new pattern to share here.

When I used this craft with large groups, we used wallpaper scraps to create the mattresses as you can see in the completed image above which was made for me by one of the girls who regularly attended my storytimes.

For the SurLaLune version of the pattern, I've created some mattresses out of clip art patterns that can be colored. The bottom blank is the base of the bed or can be used as a pattern for cutting mattresses out of different paper. Of course, the bedposts and base also are wonderful when made out of brown construction paper. The possibilities for adaptation are endless, but if all you have is a printer and some white paper, that's all you need to create this craft. Don't forget to draw a pea or paste a split pea below the lowest mattress. Enjoy!



I've made the craft available in full size in three different file formats:

Princess and the Pea JPG

Princess and the Pea GIF

Princess and the Pea PNG

Printing Tips: If you are on a PC, right click over the image to get a menu and save it to your computer. Then use a photo editor program to print it without any clipping of the image. Printing it from the internet browser will most likely cause clipping unless you adjust your printer settings to print to size. Or you can copy and paste the image to a word processing program such as Word and then adjust margins to avoid clipping before printing.

This is a smaller version of the pattern for illustration purposes only. Use the links above to get bigger images.